Splintered and Broken
by A plus
Summary: He had watched as the thin wood snapped across her knee with a violence he had not known she possessed. He had been her teacher for seven years and had never seen this girl give up at anything. Voldemort wins, Hermione leaves, Severus waits.
1. Splintered

He had watched as the thin wood snapped across her knee with a violence he had not known she possessed. She viciously threw the broken pieces of her wand at the tall blond man standing before her. The man laughed as the pieces hit him in the chest and fell harmlessly to the ground.

"I'm done. I'm fucking done. Take it. Take it all."

A crowd had gathered in front of the ministry to watch Hermione Granger confront Lucius Malfoy, the minister of magic. Severus stood at the edge of the crowd watching the conflict with an intense interest. He had been her teacher for seven years and had never seen this girl give up at anything.

She reached up to the clasp of her robes and released it, causing the heavy black material to fall into a pool at her feet, revealing the muggle t-shirt and jeans she wore beneath.

"You win. You fucking win."

With that, she turned her back to Lucius and walked away.

But there was that moment, that one moment, right after she had turned away from the minister but right before she had gotten swallowed by the crowd that he had caught her eye. He had not seen the resignation he had expected to find there. In fact, quite the opposite. He knew this girl, he had taught her, studied her intensely. The look in her deep brown eyes was one of shear determination. This girl had a plan.

The shear force of purpose behind her gaze sent a shiver down his spine. Her words had admitted defeat and everyone had taken them at their face value. There were stories written in the Daily Prophet, whispered tales and jokes at parties for months afterwards as people recounted her words and her actions as she had admitted defeat. Her eyes, however, her eyes had told him a different story. Severus was sure of her two lies: Lucius most certainly had not won and Miss Granger was certainly not done.

He had waited, waited for her to return, to take the entire wizarding world by storm with the brilliance of her plan.

She had not come.

Ten years had passed and she had still not returned. Either her plan had failed or it was a much more long-term one than he had ever imagined.

He spent the ten years in misery. It had all started a little more than ten years ago when the Dark Lord had conquered the entire wizarding world. He had instituted Lucius Malfoy as Minister of Magic and Severus as the Headmaster of Hogwarts while keeping Bellatrix Lestrange by his side to lead the Death Eaters. Muggle-borns were given a month to hand over their wands and leave the wizarding world for good. Any that failed to comply would be exterminated.

He had been loyal to the Order, of course, but they had been defeated. Harry Potter was dead. For his first five years as headmaster, Severus had remained in his post as spy and kept detailed records of Voldemort's activities. The Order had never come to collect them. It was staring at the stack of five years worth of spying records that he realized he had been abandoned by the Order. He was not a spy anymore as he had no one to be spying for. He threw the parchment in the fire. It was of no use to anyone, all it would do now was get him killed. He was amazed at how easily he became the person he had always pretended to be.

Severus had simply made the best out of the hand he had been dealt. Since Voldemort was in charge now, he gave up his role as spy and accepted his position of power in the world he had fought so hard to defeat. Severus had at first been mildly pleased at his promotion. He had always hated children and hated teaching. He thought he would be better suited to the position of headmaster than the position of professor. If nothing else, without classes to worry about he would have more time for his own experimentations. He was dreadfully wrong. If anything, he had less time. Between dealing with the idiotic children, the insane parents, and the incompetent teachers, he was left barely any time to himself.

Severus despised anyone who came to him with their stupid problems. He had no patience to listen to them and no compassion to help them. Worst of all, the Dark Lord himself carefully reviewed the curriculum, making sure that no one from this new generation would grow up to be more powerful than he. As much as Severus hated to admit to not being skilled at something, he was willing to admit to himself that he made an abysmal headmaster.

Then there was her. Not a night had gone by that she didn't enter his dreams. Her eyes, it was always her eyes. Every night was brought back to that look in her eyes that day ten years ago. He would wake with a start, sweaty and cold. It was torture. He had become a part of this horrible, evil world that they had both fought against. He had lost ideology in favor of resigned compliance. What would she think of him now? Every day, as he got out of bed, he held the small hope that today would be the day that she showed up to turn the wizarding world on its head. Every night when he went to bed he gave a disappointed sigh that she had not. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, he was waiting for this annoying, insufferable girl to come rescue him. Somehow he had staked his entire life on her.

Ten years passed. She never came.


	2. The Wandmaker's Burried Secret

_A/N: I forgot to mention it, but this story is inspired by chapter 2 of Leraiv Snape's story A Series of Unnatually close encounters. I really liked the image of Hermione breaking her own wand and decided to write a story around it._

2

Severus Snape spent ten years waiting for the girl who never appeared, disappointing him each and every day.

Then one morning he woke up and decided that he wasn't going to wait for her anymore. He was going to find her. He had no idea where to start. There was a time when he had had vast information networks throughout the wizarding world. In recent years, however, he had isolated himself, cutting off all contacts. There was little chance they even would have helped him now. She was, after all, living as a muggle.

She had snapped her wand herself, an almost unimaginable act in the wizarding world. It was why the ministry had always been so afraid of muggleborns and had crafted subtle policies against them. Muggleborns simply did not need the ministry. To them, magic was a gift, not a necessity. The threat of snapping a pureblood's wand was almost the same as the threat of death. They simply lacked the skills to survive without it. Muggleborns, on the other hand, had never needed the magical world, had always possessed the freedom to come and go at will. It was why the ministry had banned the teaching of wandless magic at Hogwarts. If you could control a wizard's wand, you could control the wizard.

Although she could survive without magic, it was hard to him to believe that she would just walk away from something at which she had so much talent. It was even harder for him to believe that she had cut off all contact with the magical world, but as he continued his search he was tempted to believe it. There was nothing, no trace of her. What he needed to find was her weakness, the one thing she would risk everything for. With him, it had been Lily. As for Hermione Granger's weakness, he had one guess. A smirk crawled its way across his face…her and her books. The smirk quickly faded as he looked up and noticed the overstuffed floor-to-ceiling shelves in his own quarters. He called in one of his subordinates.

"Get me a copy of Flourish & Blotts' business records for the past ten years."

It was his only guess, but he had a feeling that it just might be the right one.

It took him months of scanning over the records in his free time before he found the anomaly he was looking for. There it was, neatly printed on the parchment: regular shipments of books to Miss Luna Lovegood. These shipments occurred once every few months and usually contained no less than twenty books each. It was almost as if someone was building up a library. And if he had to put his money on something, he would put it on the fact that Miss Lovegood was not the person building the library. It was not that he had never seen Miss Lovegood read; In fact, quite the opposite. More often than not, her face had been buried in some sort of printed material. It was simply that he had never seen her read something so from such reputable sources. It had not been the quantity of the shipments that had caught his eye, it had been the titles. These were not books of rumors and myths, these were books of facts. And if there was ever a fan of facts, it was Hermione Granger.

Severus was forced to put his investigation on hold since his schedule for the week permitted him not free time to pursue it. He drifted back to it in his thoughts, however, as he sat through endless meeting after endless meeting.

He called in a favor to a contact at the ministry and was soon in possession of a copy of the ministry's file on Luna Lovegood. He had to admit to himself that being the right-hand-man of a sadistic dictator did have its benefits in terms of access and expediency.

According to the file, Luna Lovegood had become a wandmaker, apprenticed with Olivander himself. To be a wandmaker required a rare set of skills, an ability to sense magic, to see beyond what was there. Wandmakers were often exceptionally odd individuals. Miss Lovegood would be no exception. So the pieces were all falling into place now. Miss Lovegood would have the ability to make Hermione a wand, unregistered with the ministry, as untraceable as if it did not exist at all. Maybe she had not given up her magic entirely, but that still did not solve the question of her whereabouts of activities.

xxxxx

He entered the wand shop that night under the cover of darkness. It had been Olivander's before he had retired. It had changed under the care of Miss Lovegood. Odd objects that Severus could not identify hung around the room. He moved through the shop quickly, taking little notice. He was, after all, not here for the shop but for the witch who lived above. He easily dismantled the wards and made his way into the small apartment.

He turned the door to her bedroom slowly, expecting to find her in bed asleep when he opened it. She was not. A frail blond figure sat perched on the open window ledge, hair glowing in the moonlight.

"Hello, Professor," she said, still looking out the window. Her voice was airy and distant, exactly as he remembered it.

"Miss Lovegood," he greeted her, disconcerted by the fact that she seemed to be expecting him. He was a man who had practiced dark magic, who had knelt before the Dark Lord, but this girl, this strange little girl had always given him the creeps.

She turned around and he got a good look at her. She had gotten older but besides that had changed very little. Luna Lovegood had always existed somewhat apart from the traditional notions of time and space. She seemed to have little connection to the physical reality in which she sat, but a much greater connection to the unseen forces which ebbed and flowed around them.

"You were expecting me?" He asked, stepping into the small moonlit room.

"Yes. I felt you coming," she said, looking at him and beyond him at the same time.

"And you didn't have your wand out?" He asked, eying it across the room from her on her nightstand.

"You mean me no harm," she said simply.

He took another step closer to her.

"I am looking for something. I will need to have access to your memories." It didn't matter what he told her, he was going to obliviate her when he was done. She studied him for a moment.

"I suppose you'll force me if I don't let you."

"Yes."

"Ok then."

She stared at him, open and unguarded, granting him complete access. He wordlessly cast the spell and slipped into her mind.

He could tell immediately that her mind was different from others he had entered. It was less concrete, more ephemeral. It was difficult to distinguish between memories, fantasies, and dreams. It took him a few minutes to get the feel for it and he commenced to locate her memories of Hermione. He quickly flipped through her memories from Hogwarts, her memories from the war. But he found no memory of Hermione after the war. It was impossible. He had seen the record of the books, she must have been in contact with her. He probed further but to no avail. He was about to give up when he felt a slight snag, an almost imperceptibly raised surface like a scar when it should have been smooth. He poked at it, prodded it, tried to tear it open.

He was unsuccessful, but he was sure that her memories had been tampered with. Whoever had done the tampering had made it possible to seal off certain memories from whoever was attempting to access them and even from Luna herself. He had never heard of such a spell, but found himself faced with the unmistakable proof of one. Hermione Granger had always been trusting, too trusting even. He found it hard to believe that she would not have even trusted one of her closest friends with even the memory of her continued existence. After another few unsuccessful attempts at opening the sealed memories, he pulled out of her mind.

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

"No."

"You will."

"Sometimes it seems like all I ever find are dead-ends, trails of clues that lead me nowhere while all the time reassuring me that what I seek is out there, securely hidden."

"Nothing can be hidden forever," she whispered dreamily. He obliviated her and left. On his way out, he made duplicate copies of two books of business records that he found in her shop.

xxxxx

It seemed as though Miss Lovegood had an assistant as he could not imagine her taking such detailed and highly organized notes herself. There were two books, one which recorded each wand that was made while another that recorded each wand that was sold. He spent all night comparing the books. By the time the first rays of morning sunshine started peeking in the window, he had a total of several hundred wands unaccounted for.

The ministry kept records of this sort of thing. She would have sent her lists of wands sold to the ministry so that they could register them and use them to track and control their owners. But the book of wands made, that book was for the wandmaker only. The ministry would have no idea of the discrepancy. She was breaking at least a dozen laws and had no access to the memories of doing so. All that and he was no closer to finding Miss Granger, no closer to knowing what she was doing or where she was doing it. He only knew that whatever she was doing was important enough, dangerous enough to finally have turned the trusting girl he had known into a careful, paranoid woman. He threw the books aside and lay down to sleep.

He woke several hours later. It was another nightmare, another dream that left him with only the image of her eyes. He woke with a thought. He checked the dates of the inventories. There seemed to be a surge in the disappearance of wands, a definite yearly pattern. The wands in question seemed to disappear in large block every year towards the end of the summer…right before the start of the school term. He eyed the large calendar on his wall that marked the start of the school year in five weeks time.

"Ah, Miss Granger," he said aloud to her, to himself, "it seems as though we have ended up in a similar profession." The pieces fit together. Why else would you need large quantities of books and wands unless you were training young wizards?

He sorted through his office in a frenzy. He had not been able to bear to change it since Albus had died and most of it lay untouched except for the desk. He sorted through the stacks of books sitting on the floor beside the bookshelf. It took him almost an hour to find the one he was looking for. It was large and heavy, on the bottom of a pile. The cover was worn and dusty. It hadn't been opened in ten years. He blew the dust off and flipped through its tattered pages until he came to a section that was untouched. This was the book in which the names and addresses of all children born with magical skill was recorded. This was the book that had allowed Hogwarts to contact muggle-born children back when muggle-borns were will allowed to attend the school. He had told the Dark Lord that he had destroyed the book when in fact he had never even taken the time to look for it. He found a child, one who would be school-age this year, a muggle-born living in London named Timothy Barrington. There was nothing special about this child, he was chosen completely at random.

Severus emerged from his office to find a witch he did not recognize holding a stack of parchment.

"Sir. There is a curriculum meeting in an hour."

She must be his new secretary then. He went through them so quickly be barely even made an effort to keep track. They were all useless, incompetent and irritating. Most quit their first day. He usually managed to reduce a witch to tears before she quit. Sometimes he fired them. Sometimes he hexed them.

"I won't be attending the meeting. I have some business to take care of," he said briskly, pushing past her.

In an hour he was sitting disillusioned in a quiet muggle suburb outside of London. From what he could tell, a fairly normal family lived inside. Even from the supposedly magical child, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. He left, discouraged as night fell, but returned each day for the next week to watch and wait. Nothing happened.

On his seventh day of the stakeout, he woke suddenly to discover he had fallen asleep against a tree as he was waiting. That was unacceptable. It really was. He had been out of the spying business for too long. He had slept through the night and was currently cloaked in the almost-darkness of very early morning.

He prepared to leave, ready to call it a failure for another night when he suddenly spotted a familiar figure through the large plate-glass window. He could barely make her out from where he stood, but he wouldn't miss that wild hair anywhere, the animated hand gestures. His heart raced. After all this searching he was close, so close. He couldn't let her slip away. He moved around the side of the house until he had a good view of the front door. These were muggles, she wouldn't disturb them by apparating from inside their house.

Finally, the front door opened and a cloaked figure slipped out and hurried down the neat street-lamp lit street, glancing around occasionally. He followed silently. She rounded the corner and slipped behind a tree. There was a quiet pop and then she was gone. He stepped into the spot she had disappeared and cast a tracing spell, following her to wherever she had gone. He instantly found himself on an empty city street. It had only been an instant, she could not have gotten out of sight so quickly.

"So, you know I'm onto you," he said out loud, "I know this game." And he did. He had used it himself when he thought he was being followed. He could apparate from one location to another through a series of locations until he lost his pursuer. Now, however, he was the one doing the pursuing and he was exceptionally skilled as these sort of tracing spells. A playground, a forest, the restroom of a train station, a parking garage, each time he arrived a split-second behind her. He could still smell her, could still taste her presence in the air. He was getting closer, gaining on her. The roof of a skyscraper, a closed museum lobby, a back alley behind a dumpster, a construction site, and then darkness, he felt himself being slammed down onto a hard wood floor, and a wand being dug into the back of his neck. His breath was knocked out of him and he took a moment to recover. Her knee pressing down on his back made this difficult. He couldn't see her, but he could hear her breathing roughly behind him. Rapid apparition was physically exhausting.

"Hello Professor, or should I address you as Headmaster now?"

"Seeing as how you have a wand to my neck, you can call me whatever you wish, Miss Granger."

The tension lessened as she removed her knee and he felt the pressure on his neck subside as her wand was removed. He stood up slowly and brushed himself off, then turned to face her. She still had her wand trained on him.

"What is this place? What are you doing?" He asked, looking around the small dark room in which they stood.It contained a simple table and nothing else.

She stared at him, wand raised and unmoving, studying him. He set his wand down on the table in front of her, a symbol of surrender.

"Your wand is not your only weapon. I'll show you, but I'll have to bind your magic first. Security is very important."

It was true, he was highly skilled in wandless magic and she knew it. He had never let another wizard bind his magic. It was too risky. He would be rendered completely devoid of all magic until the binder released him. He wasn't sure if he trusted her more than he had ever trusted another or if after all these years his curiosity simply overrode all sense of precaution, but he allowed her to do it.

She opened the door and led him out into a large garden. It seemed as though the building into which they had arrived was merely an apparition chamber on the grounds of a much larger estate. As they walked through the gardens he caught sight of a good deal of potions ingredients. Up ahead was a large building.

"What do you know already?" She asked quietly.

"Just that you're teaching, that you contact Luna Lovegood for wands and books once a year and then erase her memories of the meetings."

She said nothing, but continued to walk towards the building. He followed her brisk walk, taking in his surroundings and eying her with curiosity. It had been ten years since he had last seen her and the girl he had known had been replaced by a woman at the same time both familiar and strange. In her youth, her intelligence had come across as obnoxious arrogance, but it now shown through with a quiet confidence.

"You're older," he remarked.

"Time does that," she responded, plucking a stray flower from the vine they passed and letting it fall to the ground.


	3. Blackboards and Revelations

Neither spoke for the rest of their trek across the grounds. Her reticence even more than her looks convinced him that she had aged, that she was no longer the little girl he had known. He remembered her as a child, hand waving in the air in his classroom, bursting with questions. He was struck by the fact that he was now the one with all the questions, the one being consumed by curiosity. But he kept his mouth shut and trusted that she would explain everything in her own time. He was a patient man. He had waited ten years for answers, surely he could wait a little longer.

And so they walked in silence, punctuated only by their footsteps in the soft grass and the distant sound of birds chirping. Here in this idyllic garden with the morning sun shining and butterflies flitting from flower to flower it was easy to forget that he had been held to the ground at wandpoint only a few moments earlier.

He didn't need to look at her to know that she was deep in thought, probably formulating a plan, probably deciding how much she could show him.

They entered the large building at the center of the grounds. It wasn't a castle like Hogwarts was, but had an appearance more similar to a large old country manor. She led him through a maze of hallways as he tried to glance in the open doors they passed, catching only little glimpses. They wound up several flights of stairs until they arrived at a door marked "Headmistress". She led him inside and closed it behind them.

"If you will excuse me for a second." She slipped out another door, leaving him alone in the room.

He studied her office. It was filled with lists, charts and schedules plastered on the walls and sitting in piles on every available horizontal surface. Complex color-coded lines made their way across pieces of parchment, charting out times, people, and locations, marking classes, students and assignments. On the wall behind her desk hung what appeared to be a map of the building in which they sat, similar to the maruder's map. Since it was both summer and still morning, only a few stray dots wandered around the school while the rest were contained in what appeared to be a dormitory wing. Other charts mapped out curriculum, resources, student schedules, teaching assignments, and extracurricular activities.

It was obvious to him that while he was poorly skilled at the position of headmaster, she was incredible at it. It was the role she was always meant to play. He wondered if Dumbledore had known it. Even at Hogwarts, she organized Potter and Weasley's study time. She was a natural at planning and managing other people. She had always had the incredible ability to grasp both the big picture and the most minute details simultaneously. He turned as she reentered the room carry a pile of papers which she lay on her desk.

"Would you care for a tour?" She offered, as if he was nothing more than an old acquaintance who had stopped by for tea and not a complicit member of a tyrannical regime that would kill her for even holding a wand let alone training others to use one.

"Considering I have been searching for you for months, yes, a tour is the least your could offer me."

She started to walk with him down the hall. She had been reticent since he had arrived, but they were in the hallways of her school now, she was in her element. She was visibly more relaxed in here. It occurred to him that she was in hiding, after all, and probably felt safer in the darkened hallways than in the bright openness of the garden. Hadn't he always felt more safe in the dark, damp corridors of the dungeons than anywhere else when he was spying?

"There are so many muggle-born wizards and witches. I never realized that only very few actually attended Hogwarts. Many muggle parents are understandably reluctant to send their children to a boarding school with strange magical beings and owls as the only means of contact. We allow children to live at home with their parents and take portkeys to school if they prefer. We also teach traditional muggle subjects which eases the parents' concern too."

She led him into an empty laboratory room. He recognized the periodic table from his youth. He had experimented with muggle chemistry as a teen. Next to the periodic table and other various lab equipment sat cauldrons and potions ingredients. Various equations were scrawled across blackboards covering the walls.

"We teach both muggle and magical sciences. They're not two separate worlds. They're two parts of a comprehensive whole." She pointed her wand and levitated a thick book after a second, she let it drop and it landed back on the table with a bang, stirring up the dust around it.

"When the spell is released, gravity takes over. Therefore the spell must be a separate force, counter to gravity. It must in some way relate to gravity. No one has ever combined spellwork and muggle physics. The world is both more simple and more complex than anyone has ever imagined."

He studied the equations on the board, running his fingers through the chalky dust as his mind processed the meaning of what was written there.

"I take it you are aware that you've invented at least three new branches of magic here?"

She just smiled and continued her explanation.

"We teach both muggle and magical subjects, some combined, some separate. For example, history of magic and muggle history are taught together. They have, after all, been intertwined for millennia. We teach all sorts of subjects Hogwarts never did- art and music, for example."

He casually flipped through a notebook that was sitting on one of the desks while she spoke.

"As a half-blood, I thought you might be interested in what we are doing here. With a witch for a mother and a muggle for a father you were no doubt brought up with pieces of both worlds," she studied him carefully, "and at some point forced to choose which world you wished to be a part of."

He nodded, recalling the bitter memories. He had hated his abusive muggle father and pretty early on decided that he would live in the magical world. He had had, however, enough exposure to the muggle world to miss certain things- the feel of a football under his feet, the way the landscape raced by the window of an automobile, the fiction in his father's library. He had known the muggle world enough to feel a gap where it had been after he had cut it off.

He had tried so hard to hide his muggle heritage, to fit in with the purebloods. He had gotten very good at faking it. It was, perhaps, when he first started developing the skills he would later use as a spy. He had been good enough to become the right-hand man in the pureblood revolution. But despite all his efforts, he knew he would never be one of them. He would never quite fit in with the purebloods that had been brought up solely in that world. There was more to him, and even though he hid it diligently, it was an inseparable part of him.

"Muggleborns have faced an even tougher decision, a choice between the world of their parents and the world of their friends, a choice between a world of their upbringing and a world of their power. We were always forced to choose between a world that we would never quite fit into culturally and a world in which we would always have to hide our gifts. What I'm trying to create here is another alternative, a way to integrate both muggle and magical worlds, to create a way to integrate magic into the corners and folds of the muggle world and to allow them to live together side-by-side."

Of all the things he had ever thought about Albus Dumbledore, he had never thought of the elderly wizard as conservative. For all his eccentricities, Albus Dumbledore was still a pureblooded wizard, blinded by his own upbringing. As radical as the ministry had thought Dumbledore was, he had changed very little of what was taught at Hogwarts or how it was taught. Hermione Granger had not only founded a school, she had redefined magic.

He watched as a few students passed by the open doorway of the classroom in which they sat. There was a tall boy with blond hair and a short girl with long black braids. He guessed they were around fifteen. It appeared that she allowed students to stay at school during the summer and it was now late morning and they had started to rise.

"Hello Headmistress," they chimed, passing the door and stopping for a moment to have a few words with Hermione. Their dress was an unusual combination of muggle and wizard fashions, as if they could seamlessly walk into either world without notice. He noticed that Hermione's own robes were a slightly tighter cut than was traditional in the wizarding world and that she had not seemed completely out of place when he had seen her in the muggle suburb that morning. This blending of worlds she spoke of was more than academic, it pervaded into every crack and crevice of their lives. The teenagers continued on down the hallway and she turned back towards him.

"Do you teach?" He asked curiously.

"Yes. When I first started this place, I taught all the classes."

"You have no teaching experience, no advanced training. You had barely graduated yourself when you left." He raised his eyebrow and surveyed her.

She smiled. It was a sad smile. "Actually, I've been teaching magic since I was eleven years old."

He studied her face. She had always been correcting her fellow students, helping them when they made mistakes. It came along with being the smartest kid in the class, you were always the one that others went to for help and given her natural inclination for compassion, she had never refused. A memory of her in his classroom whispering instructions to Longbottom came to the surface of his memory. She had probably taught that poor boy more than he ever had. She seemed to read his thoughts.

"I was especially good at teaching potions. It helps when you have witnessed every single mistake a person could possibly make."

She could have sworn she saw a smile on his face for a split-second. She could tell he had wanted to make some sort of scathing comment about Neville's ineptitude at potions, but he had held his tongue. It wasn't polite to speak ill of the dead. It really was a shame that most of the classmates she had helped along in their studies had never made it to adulthood, had never lived to use the knowledge she had spent so many hours drilling into their brains. Who would have guessed that the experience she received by teaching them would actually come in more useful than them learning that knowledge?

"But you have teachers now?"

"Yes. A staff of twelve, actually."

"Who are they?"

"Many are muggle-borns who left the wizarding world before the war even started. I tracked them down, got them new wands, and convinced them to use their magic again. Now that the school has been going for a while, I am starting to be able to employ teachers who were educated here. There are even a few teachers who are muggle-borns who grew up in the muggle world. They never attended a magical school so they never developed their talents. They teach muggle subjects and I teach them to use their magic. It's harder later in life of course, but some of them are making some progress."

They walked down the hallways and through the large double-doors that led into the library. He could tell by the way she opened the doors, by the way she allowed her hand to trail along the book spines as they walked, that although she spent most of her time in her office, this room was where her heart lived. The collection was made up of 2/3 muggle books and 1/3 magical books. He assumed it was because muggle literature was easier for her to acquire. He recognized some of the titles from the list that had originally led him on his hunt.

"It was how I first found your trail...the books."

"I needed them...we needed a library."

"Of course."

He looked around at the large, open room.

"There's no restricted section?"

"This is a school. Our goal is not to restrict the learning of our students."

They left the library and she led him to the end of the hallway and opened the door. They stepped outside into the sunlight of the garden. He had to blink a few times before his eyes adjusted to the brightness. They stood in the knee-high grass staring at one another.

"You still haven't answered my original question."

She tilted her head to the side and looked at him.

"What are you doing here?"

She smiled.

"What do _you_ think I'm doing?"

"Well, from the looks of it, you're either creating a separate wizarding society or you're raising an army, I haven't decided which yet."

She gave him a sad smile.

"Neither have I."

They walked in silence for a few moments before she continued.

"I cannot justify using children, even adults to attack a world they have never known in order to gain acceptance. Nonetheless, it is a very real possibility that one day either what I'm doing here will be discovered and attacked or that Voldemort and his followers will begin to attack muggles again. If either of those eventualities occur, we will be more than ready to fight." At those last words, the familiar fire flared in her eyes. It was the fire he had seen in them when she threw her wand at Lucius; It was the fire burned in his dreams and woke him up each night.

She silently led him to the apparition chamber into which he had arrived.

"I have an important errand to do. Perhaps you would wish to accompany me. This errand might be of slight interest to you."


	4. The Orphan

They stepped into the small shack he had arrived into. It was dark and cool.

He could not apparate with his magic bound, so she slipped her small hand into his and a second later they were standing in an alley in muggle London surrounded by trash. She quickly released his hand and stepped away, brushing herself off.

She stepped out of the alley onto a crowded street and he followed. They were at the edge of the city in a slightly run-down part. They approached a large, clinical looking building. The sign above the door read "South Street Orphanage." The sign hung slightly crooked on the building facade. It seems both as if it has hung that way for a decade and as if it might drop off the building at any moment.

He asked no questions, simply following her and trying to piece things together on his own.

They were greeted at the door by a prim elderly woman.

"Hermione Granger," she introduced herself, "and this is Professor Snape. We spoke on the phone?"

"Of course, of course. About the Dursley girl."

"Yes. I'd like to have a few words with you."

"Yes, right this way," the woman said, leading them to her small office.

"The name sounds familiar," Severus whispered in her ear as they walked down the narrow hallway.

"I believe you were aquainted with her grandmother."

Severus tried to think of any witches he had known by that name, but was at a loss.

Once they had been seated and offered tea, the real discussion began.

"So you are here about Dahlia?"

"Yes. What can you tell me about her?"

The woman hesitated a moment and nervously fingered the pencil which sat on her desk.

"Well, for the most part she is a very sweet girl. There have been some….incidents, however. She seems to end up in situations that she cannot explain and without a proper explaination, we have no choice but to punish her. I don't think she's a bad child, she just has a certain knack for trouble."

"How long has she been here?"

"Well, she's nine years old now. Her parents died when she was three, so she's been here for six years. What did you say your interest in her was?"

"I knew her family. I am headmistress at a boarding school and would like to offer her a place. I am indebted to certain members of her family and feel that it is the least that I can do."

The woman nodded nervously.

"We normally don't do this type of thing, you see, there are certain protocols to follow, forms and such, but little Dahlia has been….a certain amount of trouble. It might just be better for everyone if you took her and we quietly erased her records."

Hermione nodded, "Yes, I think that would be best for everyone."

"When would you like to arrange to have her transported?"

"I would like to take her with me right now, if it's possible."

"Yes, yes, of course. Let me show you to her room."

The woman led them down yet another narrow dingy corridor. Severus had not had the happiest childhood, but being in this place made Spinner's End look not so bad. They reached a small door, which the woman opened and led them into the room. Bunk beds lined the walls. Severus thought the room was empty at first, but a ray of sunshine through the dusty window revealed a small girl with dirty blond hair sitting on the floor, reading a book.

"Dahlia," the woman said, "you have some visitors."

The look on the girl's face when she looked up from her book told them that she had never had visitors before.

Hermione turned toward the woman, "We would like to speak to her alone if you don't mind."

"No, no, of course," the woman said, exiting the room and closing the door behind her.

Severus stood leaning against the wall as Hermione approached the girl, sitting on one of the small beds.

"Hello Dahlia, my name is Hermione."

Severus was amazed at how soft her voice was, how tenderly she dealt with this small girl. The girl sat next to her on the bed, but looked away shyly. The screams and laughter of children playing outside came in muffled through the thin dirty glass of the window. The little girl looked out it wistfully.

"Why aren't you outside playing with the other children?"

"I'm in trouble."

"What happened?"

"Stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"I don't know." The girl looked away, secretive and embarrassed.

Hermione pulled her wand out of her pocket and levitated a hairbrush off of the floor and over towards them as the little girl watched in amazement. When it reached Hermione, she took it in her hand, pointed her wand at it once again and transfigured it into a lily. The girl stared at the white flower with incredulity as Hermione handed it to her.

"Is this type of thing what happened to get you into trouble? Things that you somehow caused to happen without even knowing how? Things that you couldn't explain?"

"Yes," the girl whispered, staring at the older woman intensely.

"You're a witch, Dahlia. You can do magic."

The girl's eyes lit up.

"I am the Headmistress at a magical school. We can teach you how to control your magic, how to use a wand like this one, how to cast spells. If you would like, you can come live there and take classes. Would you like that?"

"Yes," the girl said with no hesitation.

Severus stood, studying the scene. He had viewed Dumbledore's memories of meeting Tom Riddle at an orphanage all those years ago. So this was what it was like to grow up believing you were a freak, that there was something wrong with you that set you apart from the other children and then to find out that it was not a defect, but a gift. Severus could only appreciate this to a certain extent, but he had a feeling that Hermione, growing up in the muggle world, must realize the true significance of this moment.

"Does this mean that my parents…before they died…would have been like me?"

"No. Your father did not possess magic and I know little about your mother, but there is no indication that she did either. Magic is genetic, however, the genes that give you your gift would have laid dormant in your family for many generations. Your grandmother did have a sister, however, that was a witch. Her son was as well. Her son was one of my best friends."

"Can I meet him?" The orphan asked, excited at the prospect of having family she had never met.

"He's dead," Hermione said softly, looking up and catching Severus' eye for the first time since they had entered the room. It was then that he remembered where he had heard the name Dursley and who this girl's father's cousin was that would have meant so much to Hermione. He had, in fact, met this girl's grandmother so many years ago. He had loved her grandmother's sister. He smiled at the thought of Petunia's reaction to her granddaughter being a witch like Lily.

They waited out in the hall while the little girl packed her belongings. Hermione was still visibly disturbed by the mention of Harry Potter. It seemed as though time had not healed the loss. It occurred to him that she had not asked him to go with her because of his connections to this girl's relations might be of interest to him, but because she wanted him there, needed him there even. He may not have been the biggest fan of Harry Potter, but he alone could understand both the depth and the tragedy of her loss.

"I wish he could have been here for this," she whispered finally, "I know that the Dursley's treated him worse than a house-elf, but I still think that he would have liked to have been here to take his niece away from all of this, to raise her in a way he had always wished he had been raised."

Since he had arrived at the school, he had seen her strong, confident, bossy, and commanding. It was what he had expected from her and her fragileness now that disturbed him. She too had been abandoned, by the deaths of her friends; the entire wizarding world had turned its back on her. She had dealt with it admirably, creating her own world, but even surrounded by the teachers and students she was still alone in her tragedy. None of them had experienced what she had, had suffered the loss, the devastation.

She stood there in the hallway staring at the peeling paint on the walls, lost in her own thoughts. He did not need to use his legimmency to know what thoughts these were.

"How do you find them?" He asked suddenly, distracting her from her thoughts. It seemed to work and she wiped away the single tear that had made its way down her cheek before launching into her explanation.

"The muggle-born children? We have gone back and traced family trees for all witches and wizards going back thousands of years. We look for the ones that disappeared into the muggle world and take over their lineages from there, checking all current ancestors of any traces of magic. We also routinely check primary school for children who have shown strange behavior. It's not a perfect system, but we find quite a few of them."

"That must take quite a bit of resources. How did you even afford to start the school?"

"Harry left me everything he had….the entire fortune of both the Potters and the Blacks. I started a school for muggleborns with the remnants of pureblood fortunes."

The girl opened the door. Everything she owned had fit into a small suitcase.

"Is there anyone you want to say goodbye to?"

"No. No one."

They exited the orphanage. Hermione raised her arm to hail a cab and Severus gave her a questioning look.

"She's new to all of this. I don't want to disturb her too much with apparition. We'll get back using muggle transportation."

They climbed into the cab with Dahlia seated between them. The day had grown overcast and it began to rain and they drove. Large drops splashed on the windshield and collected in puddles in the street. Severus stared out the window fascinated as muggles pulled out their umbrellas in desperate attempts to keep from getting soaked. Umbrellas, he had used those once, before he had the ability to cast a charm to deflect the rain. He really had been away from the muggle world for too long. Sure, rain-deflecting charms were convenient, but he had to admit that there was also a certain magic in the feeling of huddling under a stretched piece of fabric as the drops beat against it.

It was a long ride back and the rain beating against the roof of the cab had a narcotic effect. It was not that Severus had no more questions, it was just there was nothing he wished to discuss with both a muggle and a small girl listening. As some point, the girl fell asleep, leaning up against Hermione as Hermione's arm wrapped around her, holding her as she slept. He realized how this must look to the cab driver who probably assumed that they were a married couple driving home with their small daughter, sleeping in her mother's arms. If only the driver knew the truth, that they were a fugitive, a murderer spy and an orphan who could all perform magic.


	5. Haunted and Alone

And so, after a very long cab ride, they arrived back at the school. The day had slipped away and darkness had fallen already. The halls were lit with hovering candles. Severus watched the young girl's face as they walked down the halls and she took her surroundings with a look of wonderment in her eyes. This little girl was so different from the spoiled pureblooded children at Hogwarts. They had grown up with magic as their birthright, but it took an outsider to really be able to appreciate the _magic_ in it.

He waited in Hermione's office while she set up a room for the girl in one of the dormitories. He studied the charts he had seen earlier. Each one carefully documented and planned curriculum, teaching schedules, and resources in minute detail. The door opened as she returned. She seemed tired.

"It's late," she told him, "you can stay the night in the guest quarters if you like and apparate back in the morning."

"That would be appreciated," he said wearily, "it's been a long day."

She led him into a sitting room. It was sparse compared to her office. One could easily tell where she spent most of her time.

"This leads to my private quarters," she said motioning towards a door to her left, "and this to the guest quarters where you will be staying the night," a motion toward the door across from the first, "and this to the balcony," a motion towards the large set of glass doors on the far wall covered by a drawn curtain.

"I'll escort you to the apparition chamber in the morning."

Severus entered his room and removed his outer robes. He had spent the previous night outside and it had been a very long day, so he expected to fall asleep immediately. Several hours later, he found that he was still lying on the bed wide awake. The day had opened his eyes to a whole world he had not known even existed. He could understand why she had become to paranoid, carefully covering her tracks. Training a new generation of Muggle-borns was the most dangerous thing she could be doing.

It had taken four exceptional wizards to found Hogwarts; Hermione Granger had done this alone. She was powerful, of course, and intelligent. The Dark Lord might fear her for these qualities, but it was the one quality that he would not feel threatened by that was actually the biggest threat to him and his regime. It was her skill at organization that made her a threat. If she had spent the past ten years strengthening her power and spellwork, she would have been a minor challenge to Voldemort, but she had instead started a school from nothing and created an army. As powerful as she could possibly be alone, an army of well-trained witches and wizards was more of an advantage.

It was her skill at organization that set her apart. He was sure that she would not have had this skill had she been born a pureblood and raised in a wizarding family. He had no doubt that if he opened her desk, all her files would be in alphabetical order, that if the opened her closet all her clothing would be carefully hung according to color and use. For a wizard or witch that had always been able to simply "accio" anything they needed, organization would have been unnecessary. It would never have been learned because it would never have been needed. Only a child who had had to search through her bookshelves for the one particular book that she wanted to read would have learned the value of keeping them arranged by subject, by author, by title.

Organization had been the downfall of the Order of the Phoenix, a small loosely-bound and highly informal group. It operated more closely to a book club than to an army. If only they had focused more efforts of recruitment, more of reliable communications to all members, more on regular and orderly meetings, more on standardized training. Maybe if they had just lasted long enough for Hermione Granger to take charge. But they hadn't. After Dumbledore's death, the Order had been hanging on by a thread. After Potter's death, they had completely disintegrated. The fulfillment of the prophecy had been their plan. After Potter's death rendered that impossible, they were left without strategy or direction. No one had made a back-up plan. Well, no one besides Granger it seemed. He didn't know how many years she had been planning this before it had finally been set into action. The fact that Potter had left her everything suggested that maybe she had even gone as far as to plan it with him before his death.

These thoughts swirled in his head, making sleep impossible. He felt as if had been asleep for the past ten years, subdued and lulled by compliance. It was her eyes that had woken him from his sleep each morning and her deeds now that kept him up, staring at the ceiling as sleep eluded him.

He stepped out through the curtain onto the cool balcony. He was surprised to find her already out there, staring off into the darkness. It was a warm summer night and her hair that had been carefully pinned up all day like a proper headmistress now hung in loose curls whipping against her shoulders in the wind. She spoke softly into the night without even turning around.

"You've been haunting my dreams for ten years."

"You've been haunting mine." He stepped closer.

"That moment, right after I snapped my wand, when you caught my gaze. You knew I was planning something. I cursed myself for looking at you, for giving it all away. I had my occulmency barriers up, not that you even held my gaze long enough to try, but I still felt as though you could see everything laid bare in front of you, that you could see my entire soul."

She stopped talking for a few minutes and continued to stare out into the night as he remained silent. Then she resumed her story.

"I knew that if anyone would be able to find me, it would be you. I was pretty sure, at that point, that you were not loyal to Voldemort, but not positive. I thought that maybe since Harry was dead, you were no longer bound to the Order. I wasn't sure if you had become outwardly compliant or inwardly as well, if maybe you would expose my plans to secure your position. The first five years of my exile, I waited for you to come find me. I dreamt about it every night. I held my breath during the day. Every time I rounded a corner, I wondered if you would be there waiting for me on the other side, waiting to drag me back to that world, waiting to turn me in. I lived in fear, but you never came. I knew that if you were loyal to him that you would find me, that you would expose my plans, but you never did. I waited and you never did. After five years, I realized that you were not coming, that you were still loyal to the Order even if the Order no longer existed."

"You said ten years."

"Even after, even after I realized you were not coming for me, I kept dreaming about you. During the days, every time I brewed a potion, every time I taught a class, I wondered what you would think of it all." She had never gotten his approval as his student. He was shocked that ten years later as a confident woman, the headmistress of her own school, the commander of an underground army, that she would want it. He was very good at reading between the lines, at extrapolating the things people said into the things they didn't say. As much as she had began training muggleborns for their own protection, for her own revenge, she had been doing it for him. She had been doing it for that half-blood boy he had been, who had never fit in and who had been forced to turn his back on a part of himself. She saw her own actions through his eyes just as he had watched himself through her eyes.

Her white nightgown whipped around her in the warm summer wind. She had still not turned to face him, but had been staring off into the star-speckled blackness as she spoke. He was still wearing the clothes from the day although he had removed his outer robes. His white shirt was uncharacteristically wrinkled from the time he had spent lying in bed trying to sleep.

He said nothing, but stepped up closer behind her her so that they were almost touching. For the first time, he could smell her. He breathed in deeply. She finally turned to face him. He was so close that when she turned around she was practically in his arms.

"I still think about you every day," she whispered.

Without thinking, without planning, he stepped forward into her, lowering his lips to hers and kissing her with everything he had, arms closing around her and pulling her against him, hands roaming across her thinly-covered body.

He was aware that over the years he had developed an unhealthy obsession with her, that she was always there lingering in the back of his thoughts. He knew on some level that he thought about her more than a man should think about a person they had not seen in ten years and even before that barely known. He knew that somewhere in the back of his mind she was the last member of the Order who was still alive, his last hope at resistance and that the thought of freedom was inseparable from the thought of her. He had been aware of these things even if he had not fully admitted them to himself. What he had not known was that at some point this obsession had taken on a sexual tone.

He could not pinpoint the exact moment he had started wanting her because before this moment he had not even been aware that he did want her. But here on the balcony with her body pressed up against his in the warm night air, the fact that he wanted her was unmistakable. His body reacted as if he had wanted her for a long time. Maybe he had. Maybe he had wanted her since he saw the fire in her eyes as she snapped her thin wand across her knee. From the way she rubbed her body against his and moaned into his mouth, it appeared that the feeling was mutual.

She took his hand and led him back inside into her chamber, into her bed. He slowly pulled her nightgown over her head and climbed on top of her. He could feel her magic colliding with his, breaking and crashing against him as he thrust into her. Their magic pulsed and exploded with their physical motions, both mirroring and provoking.

Afterwards, they lay side by side, recovering and breathing heavily. The room was dark but for the narrow beams of moonlight which streamed in through the window.

"What was that?" she whispered, turning her face towards him, hair splayed out wildly around her, "With the magic, is it always like that?"

He studied her face in the moonlight. This obviously hadn't been her first time, how could she not have known what it was like?

"You're not...a virgin."

She shook her head. He stared into her eyes for a moment, searching for the answer as his hand reached over and stroked her hair.

"You've never been with a wizard before." He guessed.

She nodded, "Only muggle men."

He didn't respond. This explained why she was familiar with the physical effects of sex while the magical ones had caught her by surprise.

"The only wizards I know are either students or employees...it's just less complicated with muggles."

These words gave him a brief glimpse into her life. She was surrounded by adoring students and faculty members here, but she was the headmistress, the boss. There was a certain distance that had to be maintained. She was always there to help people, of course, always there for anyone who needed to talk. She was there for everyone but still to utterly alone.

He could imagine her, on lonely nights, maybe nights like the anniversary of Potter's death, of Weasley's, giving in to the need to not be so completely alone. He could imagine her dressing in muggle clothing slipping out of the school in the moonlight, apparating far away to some anonymous muggle bar. He could imagine her letting herself be picked up by some anonymous muggle man who had no idea who she was or what she had been through. He was probably a clean-cut guy in a business suit who noticed a sad-looking attracting woman drinking by herself at the bar and meandered over to buy her a drink hoping it would lead to more. She would spend the night with him, letting herself be physically close to someone, to allow physical intimacy fill the void of emotional intimacy in her life.

He would be a nice guy, an adequate lover. Maybe she would want to see him again, but what would the point be in that? There was only so close she could get to him before certain questions were bound to come up. There were things she could never tell him, things she would always have to hide from him. She had been hiding for the past ten years. It was easier just to find someone new the next time, to avoid getting close to anything she would have to give up. She would cast a silencing charm while he slept, getting dressed and slipping out before he woke up.

She would take no relationship over one in which she had to hide parts of herself.

He studied her as she lay there. She had aged, of course, from the nineteen-year-old girl he had last seen. She was now closer to thirty, but the physical changes did not surprise him. Instead, he felt as though he had always been surprised when he looked at her when she was younger. This older version of herself was closer to her than the younger one had ever been. Her outside appearance finally reflected the maturity that had alway been internally present.

He studied her body as he drifted off to sleep.

xxxx

Severus woke in an unfamiliar bed and rolled over, taking in his surroundings. The sheets were soft, much softer than the ones he was used to. Sunlight spilled in through the windows although the crisp air told him it still must be very early in the morning. The pillow next to his still held the indentation of the witch who no longer occupied it. He wondered where she was for a moment before hearing the rustling of papers from the adjoining room. He groggily pulled himself out of bed, dressed in his clothes from the previous day and went to investigate. She sat at a small table in the sitting room. There were a few various muffins and pastries of the table as well as a cup of tea. She looked up from her papers and motioned for him to sit, conjuring another teacup. He drank in silence, studying her as she read. He glanced at the clock.

"There is a meeting at Hogwarts in a quarter of an hour that I am expected to attend."

She nodded and put down the papers. She pulled a set of dark robes over her muggle clothing and opened the door, leading him downstairs and outside. They crossed the grounds in the brisk air of early morning on their way to the apparition chamber. He let the fresh cool air fill his lungs. This air was untainted by the darkness which now surrounded Hogwarts.

They reached the apparition chamber and both stepped inside. She raised her wand to his temple and was about to cast the spell when a look of realization passed over his face and she felt his large hand wrap around hers, stilling the motion of her wand.

"Please don't"

"I can't leave any loose ends."

"Why did you show me all this if you were just planning to obliviate me?"

"It doesn't make sense, I know. I just wanted to see your reaction. I wanted to show you. I think of you, often, I wonder what you would think of all this. I had to know."

"Did you also wonder how I would feel inside of you? You always were a curious girl." He sneered.

She looked away.

"You had sex with me knowing you would obliviate me afterwards," he said accusingly.

"Yes," she replied, unblinking in the face of his fury.

His indignant anger softened and his voice became softer and sadder.

"Please," he begged.

She looked up at him with a strange expression. She had never heard these words from his lips before.

He was not a man who begged for anything. He had only begged twice in his lifetime. The first was to the Dark Lord to spare the life of Lily, the second was to Dumbledore to kill him. He had sworn to himself that he would never beg for anything again since the two times he had put his dignity aside, his wishes had gone ungranted. Yet here he was, begging to this woman some twenty-years younger than him just to be able to keep his memories. For all his sacrifices, this is what his life had come to.

"It would make my miserable existence just a little bit more tolerable to know…just to know that all this was here."

She eyed him consideringly. It wasn't that she didn't trust him, it was just that she couldn't allow herself to trust anybody. The best way to keep something a secret was for no one to know about it. She had even been obliviating Luna, the last friend she had left. Paranoia had simply become a way of life, a method of survival. She had been so careful for so many years. How could she take this risk now? It wasn't just a risk to herself, it was a risk to all she protected. And she had never been one to take unnecessary risks.

But still, she dropped her wand from his temple and reached into her robes, pulling out his wand. She unbound his magic and handed him back his wand. He took it from her and watched her walk out of the apparition chamber, leaving him in there alone, memories intact. She trusted him, he realized, not only to hold onto the secrets that put her in danger, but the secrets that protected the lives of so many others. She trusted him not only to have the intentions of protecting her secret, but to have the skill and ruthlessness to keep it from all others. He stood there for a moment, listening to her footsteps fade off into the distance outside the chamber before apparating back to Hogwarts.

A/N: I originally had just one more chapter after this one, but now I'm trying to decide whether or not to make it longer.


	6. Broken

_A/N: Thank you everyone for your great reviews. This was originally going to be the last chapter, but I've decided to keep it going and take it further. It might take a little longer for the next chapter to go up, because I keep skipping around and writing stuff that isn't going to come until must later (and also getting distracted by other stories). Sorry for any typing/grammar mistakes. The reviews really help me evaluate how I'm doing and have also given me some ideas of where to go with the story after this chapter. Thanks again._

x

x

A month later...

Anyone who had ever had him as a teacher would tell you that Severus Snape was a perfectionist in every sense of the word. He was such a careful man, so meticulous. He had survived as a spy for so many years, after all, a profession in which even the tiniest error could have gotten him killed. He put this same discipline into everything he did. Each action, each motion was carefully measured and thought-out. He didn't make mistakes, which made his death all that more tragic. It was a reminder to everyone about the dangers of a career in potions, that even the most careful of us can make a fatal error. It was so ironic that after decades of taking off points for even the tiniest mistake from each of his students, it had been his own that had killed him.

Or at least that was what it said in the Daily Prophet...

x

x

He entered her office, but she was so lost in her own world that she made no notice of his presence. She stood with her back to him and stared out the window, her hand absent-mindedly running over the newspaper which sat on the bookshelf beside her. He could make out the headline from where he stood: _Headmaster, Loyal Death Eater and Potions Master Found Dead in Explosion._ Her hand was running across the picture underneath. The paper was three weeks old. It was cold outside and her warm breath so close to the window was causing the glass to fog up. She seemed not to notice; she was staring at nothing and so had no reason to be bothered by the fact that her view was being obscured.

"I never took you to be one for daydreams," his silky voice broke the silence of the room.

She jumped slightly and whipped around. Her eyes widened in shock at the sight of him. She suddenly blushed and removed her hand from the newspaper it had been caressing. She quickly composed herself and sat down at her desk.

"You're _supposed_ to be dead," she replied calmly and accusingly.

"Surely you don't believe everything you read in the Daily Prophet. They are, after all, the same paper that reported that Hermione Granger gave up magic."

Her lips curled into a tired smile.

He thrust a piece of paper onto the desk in front of her.

"What's this?" She asked, looking down at it.

"It's my CV."

She looked back up at him.

"Why are you giving this to me?"

"I thought that was obvious, Headmistress. I'm applying for a teaching position."

Her smile grew wider for a second before she forced all emotion from her face.

"Very well, Mr. Snape," she said in her best headmistress voice, "If you'll take a seat, I can conduct the interview right now."

He nodded and sat while she pulled out a quill and her standard list of interview questions from the desk.

"Although I must inform you that it is protocol for a person seeking employment to set up an interview in advance, not to simply show up and demand one."

"I understand; however, the past few weeks have been rather busy for me," he motioned towards the newspaper which still sat on the bookshelf, "I'm sure you understand."

"Shall we get started?"

"By all means, proceed."

She glanced down at her list of interview questions.

"Please describe your last position and your relationship to your employer."

"I was Headmaster at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry where I tried to ensure that generations of young minds would be kept ignorant and weak. I constantly betrayed my employer. He, in turn, subjected me to the Cruciatus curse whenever he felt the whim."

"And how did your employment there end?"

"I faked my own death."

"Would you mind if I contacted your previous employer as a reference?"

"That's probably not a good idea since you're supposed to be a muggle and I'm supposed to be dead."

"And what about your employer previous to that one?"

"I murdered him," he responded bluntly.

"Moving on then…why did you decide to become a teacher?"

"The decision was forced upon me."

"Please describe your teaching style."

"I intimidate and terrorize the students. I pick favorites based on family connections or my own whims and ridicule the others. I grade incredibly unfairly. My goal for each class is to reduce at least one student to tears. I achieve my goal with amazing consistency."

She was putting up an admirable fight with the smile threatening to creep its way onto her face.

"I have to be honest with you, Mr. Snape, this is the worst job application I have ever received."

"I have no doubts." For the first time since he had arrived that night, he allowed the corners of his lips to curl into a slight smirk.

"And yet, despite your terrible employment history and abysmal teaching record, you come into my office so smug and sure that I will offer you a job."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on her desk. His expression grew serious for the first time since he had arrived. He had, after all, come here to confess his sins. She was his confessor. He laid his soul on the table bare in front of her.

"Because part of what made Albus Dumbledore a great headmaster was his ability to see the best in people. You have _always_ shared this ability. He could find a talent in anyone and a place for them in the world he created. He even found something that the idiot half-giant oaf Hagrid was good at. I have spent the last thirty years of my life serving one master or another. I have been forced to do unspeakable things for both. I know I'm not the most amiable, the most patient teacher. I have been treated cruelly by others and have treated others cruelly. I did what I had to do. I make no excuses. I have come here seeking…" His eyes had a far away look in then as he searched for the right word.

"Redemption?" She offered.

"In a way. I have spent my life brewing evil and destruction. I would like to create, to do something good...as cliche as that sounds. Maybe it's too late for me. Maybe I'm too old. But I really would like to help in some way. I can only hope that you can find some place in this incredible world you have created for _me_."

She leaned back in her chair, studying him with a considering eye. He knew that he had her. He had known that he had her even before he had arrived. She had always had a thing for the misunderstood, mistreated outcasts. He had seen her as a child with the house elves, with that horrendous cat of hers.

"I actually do need someone to teach upper level potions and defense. We also have some research projects going on that you would be of great assistance on." She leaned forward in her chair and looked him in the eye, "I will, under NO circumstances, let you near the younger children."

He smirked.

"I can set up quarters for you in the building. There is also a spare lab adjoining mine. You are welcome to work with me on developing new potions and spells if you like."

"I would like that very much."

"And one more thing. We are having our annual beginning of the year ball this evening. Since you are now a Professor of the school, your attendance is required."

"Very well."

He turned to leave, reaching the door.

"There are no houses here," she called after him.

"What did you say?" He asked, turning around.

"We don't divide the students up into houses here. There are no house points for you to subtract."

"You take the fun out of everything, don't you? No torturing first years! No subtracting points from Gryffindor! Next you'll be telling me that I can't use unforgivable curses on my own students."

"Severus!" She called after him, but he was already halfway down the hallway, grinning broadly. This was going to be fun.

xx

Much to her surprise, he showed up to the ball that night. He must have transfigured his teaching robes into something a little bit more appropriate for the occasion because he had arrived at the school with nothing but the clothes he wore. The ballroom had been decorated for the occasion, candles floated and shimmered as music floated in from an unseen source.

The headmistress circulated around the room welcoming both students and teachers back for the new school year. Severus stood in a corner with his trademark glare on. There were students all around, students who didn't know him, who didn't even know that this glare was his trademark move. They would learn. He was trying hard to establish his reputation quickly and efficiently. He was, after all, not one to procrastinate.

He tried to remember back to when he had first started teaching at Hogwarts. How had he established his reputation in the first place? He had been young then, just a few years older than some of the seventh years, but he had had them quaking with fear by the end of the first month. Part of it, of course, he could attribute to his naturally charming personality, but there was more. At the time, he had been torn apart by Lily's death and had taken it out on the students with his unreasonable mood swings and hatred of any Gryffindor female who reminded him of her in the least. But there had been more, even then. There had been rumors of him being a death eater. Some of the Slytherin students had been children of his fellow death eaters and had learned the truth from their parents, quickly circulating the rumors around the school. His case had been sealed, a private hearing with the transcripts destroyed afterwards, but that had not stopped the rumor-mill of Hogwarts from speculating. Even after the first war was long-since over, the residual fear had been passed down from one year to the next until it was still associated with his name, but the reasons were forgotten. He supposed that Hermione had told these children of the wars, of death eaters. He would simply have to start spreading some rumors himself.

His scheming was interrupted by a petite figure wearing a deep blue gown stepping in front of him, blocking the students' view of his glare.

"You'll have plenty of time to show them just how mean you can be later. Right now you should be dancing"

He scowled at her.

"Albus was always trying to get me to dance. I don't dance."

"I'm your boss and I order you to dance," she said bossily, putting her hands on her hips. What had he gotten himself into?

"He tried that one too."

"And it didn't work?"

"I never disobeyed him."

"Then why have I never seen you dance?"

"He could never find a female willing to dance with me."

"Then I have an advantage over him."

He quirked an eyebrow at her.

"I'm a female."

She took his hand and led him onto the dance floor, finding that although he never danced, he still knew how. He held her close to him as they swayed with the music.

"I take it that your _other _employer never tried to get you to dance."

She was short against his tall body, but the vibrations in his chest let her know that he was laughing at her comment.

"No, that was one thing that the Dark Lord never asked me to do."

They continued to dance, his hand firmly gripping her lower back as she chattered away.

"I've been working on preparing your quarters. I hope the lab is up to your standards. It's large, but probably not as well-stocked as your one at Hogwarts…" She had never been able to stop talking when she was nervous. "We grow our own potions ingredients, but it's probably not the wide selection that you're used to and.."

"Hermione," he interrupted her, and her blabbering suddenly came to a stop. "While I appreciate the effort you have put into my lab and my quarters and my teaching position, I didn't come here for them."

She stared at him for a few moments, her eyes asking the unvoiced question.

"I came here for _you_."

She stopped dancing and took a step away from him so that she could see his face.

A few of the students dancing nearby had started looking at their headmistress and this odd-looking stranger with interest.

She ducked out of the ballroom and motioned for him to follow outside into the garden where they could speak without being overheard by students. Once the door was closed behind them and they stood in the moonlight of the stone patio, she picked up just where they had left off.

"You _what_?"

"I came here for you."

She said nothing, but continued to stare at him in amazement.

"I am…" he started and then paused and started again, "I am a broken man in so many ways. I have cut away pieces of my soul both by choice and on command. But what is left, all that is left, is yours."

She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.

"We've all been broken," she whispered in his ear.

A few minutes passed in their embrace until she pulled away with a sigh.

"I really should be getting back to the ball. Will you meet me in my chambers afterwards?" She asked mischievously.

He nodded and she began walking back towards the door.

"Hermione," he called after her, "we can't let the students find out about us."

She stopped and turned as he caught up to her.

"I don't see why not. We're both mature adults and there's no reason that…"

"If they see that I'm in love with you, they might just start to question the veracity of the dark, menacing loveless character of Professor Snape."

"No," she said, stepping closer to him, "No more secrets, no more lies. I have to hide enough as it is, I'm not going to hide this."

"Mister Smith? Is that the history teacher's name? He's a good-looking man. People are going to find out that I was once your teacher. It might give some of the girls...ideas. What kind of headmistress would you be if you allowed those things to happen? Wouldn't you be setting a bad example for the children?"

She glared at him. How did he know just what to say to get to her?

"Fine. We keep it a secret."

There would be secrets; there would always be secrets, but at least now she had one person she could share them with.


	7. Severus' First Day of School

Hermione entered her rooms, letting out a deep sigh of exhaustion. It had been a long night and she had been wearing heels; her feet were sore. She took off her shoes, holding them in one hand as she wandlessly lit the candles with the other. Her breath caught as she saw that she was not alone in the room, but there had been a figure waiting for her in the darkness. He sat in an armchair, silently staring at her with his burning black eyes. She said nothing to him, but softly set down her shoes and began to undress, eyes never leaving his. Her dress rippled softly into a pile at her feet and she stepped out of it, crossing the room towards him. She did not stop when she reached him but continued past, into the bedroom beyond. He followed.

Severus woke the next morning to the same set of eyes that he had awoken to every morning to for the past ten years. Only this time, they were not a dream. They were the eyes of the woman lying next to him in bed, cautiously peering into his own.

"Good morning," she whispered and he had no more need for dreams.

She leaned over and kissed him, sliding closer to him under the sheets. No, he had no more need for dreams.

An hour later, he slipped out of her rooms and down the stairs to his own quarters to change. It was early enough that no students were around to see him. After a few wrong turns, he made it to his room. It was furnished with a desk, a small sofa, and a bed. He stood in his stark chamber, looking around. He had lived in the same room, taught at the same school for almost three decades. To be somewhere else now seemed... uncomfortable. No matter how many bad memories Hogwarts held for him, it had been his home for most of his life. He knew the halls of Hogwarts like the back of his hand, every crack, every stone. He was a stranger here. He did not know these halls and they did not know him. He was in unfamiliar territory.

Getting to know Hogwarts had always been important to him. As a student, a small niche to hide in or a hidden passageway could mean the difference between being tormented by Potter and Black and being left alone. When he came back to teach, he was always aware that danger was not far behind. He had always known there was a good possibility that one day Hogwarts would be attacked, that one day those hallways would be turned into a battlefield. And so he had walked them every night, tracing the stones. He had always known that it could mean the difference between life and death and he had been right. He hadn't expected to miss it, to miss the castle as if it were a person, as if it were a friend, but he did. A part of him longed to walk in the cool dank dungeon again, to inhale its scent and hear the echoes of his own footsteps. But what was a building compared to a woman, compared to freedom?

After he changed, Severus returned to Hermione's office. There were two witches on their way out as he entered. He assumed the older one was probably a professor while the younger one he took for a student in her final year.

"This is our newest faculty member, Severus Snape," the headmistress told the witches. The older one stared at him with a blank face, but the younger one flinched slightly as though his name meant something to her. He studied her closely, but concluded that he had never met her before.

"Severus," Hermione continued, "This is Susan Robbins, our upper level charms teacher, and Melinda Thomas, who teaches charms to the younger levels." Both women nodded to him and left, the door closed behind them.

"That younger one, Melinda, is she muggle-born?"

"Yes."

"She reacted as if she knew my name. I don't recognize her from Hogwarts."

Hermione hesitated a moment.

"Do you remember Dean Thomas?"

"Gryffindor in your year?" Hermione shifted and her eyes wandered, staring at some spot out the window far in the distance. She avoided talking about the dead whenever she could.

"Yes. Melinda is his younger sister. By the time she was old enough to attend Hogwarts, the wizarding world was on the brink of war. Dean made sure his family kept her at home and out of danger. She was one of the first students I recruited when I started this place."

"She seems young, too young to be teaching."

"She's twenty-three. I was younger than that when I started, you were too."

She seemed lost in thought for a moment but then her eyes refocused and she stood, gathering up an armful of papers.

"Come, I'll show you to your classroom."

She led him through the strange corridors as he tried to memorize every twist and turn so that he could make it back. Finally they reached a heavy wooden door. She pushed it open to reveal an empty classroom. It was the same classroom he had seen when she gave him the tour, littered with heavy cauldrons and glass beakers. There was a tall man around his own age at the front of the classroom with his back towards them, scratching symbols on the chalkboard. The man turned around and wiped his dusty hands on his pants before extending his hand in greeting. Severus shook it and introduced himself.

"This is Gerald Phelps," Hermione explained, "You are going to be teaching a combination chemistry-potions class with him."

Hermione excused herself, leaving the two men alone in the silent classroom. Gerald was taller than Severus, and thinner, with graying brown hair and wiry glasses.

"Hermione tells me you're a potions master," the man said, a spark of excitement in his eye.

"Yes," Severus replied, "and you?"

"Oh, no, no, not even close. My background is in chemistry. I wasn't raised in the magical world. I have no formal magical schooling. I was teaching chemistry at a university before I came here. The headmistress has been teaching the potions part of the class, but as you know, she has about a million other things to do. It's about time she hired someone."

Severus surveyed the man's notes on the chalkboard.

"Is this your work?"

"Yes. I've begun analyzing potions ingredients in terms of their chemical makeup and trying to explain their reactions according to known formulas."

"How is that going?"

"Well, potions don't behave exactly like normal substances, because there's magic involved in the process, so I'm in the process of modifying the standard formulas to explain these reactions."

Severus was intrigued.

"Do you have any background in chemistry?"

"I read all the chemistry books I could get my hands on when I was younger…performed some experiments at home…but it has been a long time." He had continued his reading of the muggle science even as he had started in the Dark Lord's service. It was when he had become a spy that he had decided to limit his secrets to only what was necessary and had gotten rid of the chemistry books. In those times, a book of muggle science would have been tantamount to a death sentence. He had had enough secrets that would have gotten him killed; he had not needed one more.

"We have a few hours before class starts," Gerald said, clearing the chalkboard, "do you want to go grab some lunch?" A few minutes later, they were sitting in a small café on a muggle street. They ordered some sandwiches and Gerald discreetly waved his wand under the table, casting a spell around them so that their conversation would not be heard.

"You said you had no formal magical schooling, how was it that you came to learn spells?"

"I guess I should start at the beginning. It's a long story, but a common one to a lot of the teachers here. Hearing it might help you understand. I guess it all starts with my unhappy childhood. I was the magical child of parents who wanted nothing more than to be normal. They didn't understand and punished me for magic that I could not control. The Hogwarts letter came and they threw it away. My parents didn't want me to get better at magic, they wanted me to grow out of it."

Severus snorted, as if such a thing were possible.

"Luckily for me there was a woman who lived down the block from me, old Mrs. Plum. One day I was playing in my friend's yard and the ball went over the fence and into her bushes. She was the crazy old woman on the block. The neighborhood kids were scared of her, so they sent me to retrieve it. I snuck to where they couldn't see me and concentrated hard on the ball until I had levitated it up over the fence and into my hands. It took a few tries and a rose bush got destroyed in the process. The other children never knew what I did, but Mrs. Plum, peering out the crack in her lace curtains, saw everything."

He paused for a moment as their sandwiches came and once the waitress had turned her back, continued his story.

"You can imagine my horror when that night I returned home and my parents informed me that Mrs. Plum had stopped by and told them how I had ruined her rose bushes. She had requested that as a punishment, I be sent over the next day to help her replant them. When I arrived, she led me inside instead of straight into the back yard as I expected. I was terrified as I sat on her sofa, waiting for this crazy old woman to yell at me. I didn't think that it was possible to be any more afraid…until I heard her next words. She told me that she had seen what I had done, how I had used magic to get the ball back over the fence. All I could think of was how angry my parents would be to know not only that I had used magic on purpose, but that I had been careless enough to let someone see me. And Mrs. Plum, would she alert the authorities that I was some sort of freak? I wanted to run out of that stuffy living room as fast as I could and never come back, but her next words stopped me. She told me that her sister used to use the same technique when they were playing many years ago. She told me about how her entire family had been magical like me, but how she had been born without the gift."

"A squib?"

"Yes. She was a squib from a pureblood family. They had been ashamed of her and had forced her to leave for the muggle world as soon as she became old enough to live on her own. She asked why I was not attending Hogwarts and I told her what my parents had done with the letter. She went upstairs and I waited for her to return, my eyes nervously roaming the room. Finally, she returned with a small wooden box. I opened it and there was a wooden stick inside. I stared at her, not comprehending what it was. She told me that it was a wand and that I could use it to channel my power. It had been her sister's. It wasn't perfect for me, of course, but it worked. She told me that I would never simply grow out of my gifts. It was only by learning how to control them that I would be able to stop things from happening spontaneously. She brought me up to her attic and showed me a trunk. It was her sister's trunk from school. It still contained all the text books, all the necessary supplies. I spent hours up there, reading through the books, amazed at all the spells, the potions. It was the first time that I had ever thought of my abilities as something positive, not just as something to be hidden away. It was dark by the time I returned home."

Severus had no idea that a squib would even be able to teach magic. Squibs were as much a victim of the muggle/magical divide as the muggle-born wizards.

"Mrs. Plum returned to my house the next day. She spoke with my parents, telling that that she could use some extra help around the house with yard work and some basic home repairs. It was hard, she told them, for an old woman to live by herself. She asked if I might have a few hours each day after school to come by and help her out. My parents, glad to get rid of me, agreed. And so, each day after I finished my muggle lessons at school, I went over to Mrs. Plum's house to take my wizarding lessons. She had never cast a spell, of course, but she had seen her family do it. She could give me everything I couldn't get from the books. She could tell me when my swish was too wide of my flick too fast. She told me the stories her sister had told her, about Hogwarts, about Hogsmeade, about Diagon Alley. She was my bridge to a world that I had no part in. I lived in the muggle world, of course, but I always knew that I would never be a part of it. I always knew that I was different, more connected to a world I had only heard of in stories that to the one I walked through each day."

The man paused and then continued his story.

"I begged Mrs. Plum to take me to Hogsmeade or to Diagon Alley, but she said she had promised her family that she would never set foot in the magical world. She told me that once I turned seventeen, I could travel there on my own. But by the time I was seventeen, a war had broken loose in which people like me were being hunted and killed."

Severus nodded, he had, after all, been one of the ones doing the hunting.

"I had continued my muggle schooling this whole time. One afternoon, I arrived at Mrs. Plum's house to find her dead. I ran away from home that night; there was nothing left for me there. I was eventually accepted into a chemistry program at a University. After I graduated, I was offered a teaching position. I had no more contact with anyone that had any connection to the magical world until Hermione came and found me about eight years ago."

"I had no idea…"

"That magic was taught outside of Hogwarts? You'd be surprised how common my story is. Squibs are just as important as muggle-borns in forming the link between the two worlds. Magic is practiced behind closed doors in the muggle world, passed down from one generation to the next in secret. There are even pockets, little communities within cities in which magic is openly used. Magic existed long before Hogwarts and will continue to exist long after."

They paid and left the small café, making their way back to the alley where they had apparated. As they made their way through the busy London street, Severus felt out of place. The muggle world just had a different texture, a different feel to it. The colors seemed brighter, the noises louder. They crossed the street between shiny automobiles, narrowly avoiding an accident with a bicycle. Nearly everyone on the street seemed to be talking into tiny telephones with screens that blazed blue and green. Sure, he had known the muggle world, but he had known the 1970's version of it, and even then he had never spent much time in large cities. It had been 1971 when he had first attended Hogwarts and 1979 when he had graduated. Lily had been his connection to the muggle world, making him listen to music her sister sent her, showing him articles in the latest magazines. He had taken it all in eagerly, eager for anything that would bring him closer to Lily.

Sometime in the mid 70's, he started hiding his muggle heritage. Lily was lost to him around the same time. He thought he knew the muggle world, but the world he knew bore only a slight resemblance to the one through which he currently strode. It seemed as though the muggle world was progressing as a faster rate than the magical one. Technology was accelerating to unimagined levels while the magical world had changed little in his lifetime. Maybe the magical world would have progressed more if didn't keep trying to destroy itself. For the last thirty years, the future had seemed bleak. War was always on the horizon. It was hard to dream, hard to make any progress when you knew it could all be destroyed tomorrow.

The two men returned to school and prepared their lesson. The first class went well. They went over the basics as well as a brief summary of their course of study for the year. Severus observed the interested nods of the students, the furious scribbling of notes, the insightful questions.

As he watched Gerald thoughtfully answer an excited question, he realized that he did not want to be hated or feared by these students. For the first time, he found himself wanting the admiration, the respect of those he taught. He unconsciously pulled his left sleeve down a little further, covering all traces of the mark. These children were so different than those at Hogwarts. They wanted to learn. They viewed magic as a privilege. They were aware that their school existed as a secret, that they were being taught in rebellion. Even though they had never laid eyes on the people against whom they were rebelling, it gave their education a tinge of excitement. It turned out that making learning against the rules was the best thing you could do to get teenagers to study.

After dinner, Severus returned to his chambers. He sat at his desk looking through the stack of papers on it. He contemplated seeking out the Headmistress, but was hesitant. He wasn't sure if Hermione expected or even wanted to see him tonight. He had told her that he had come for her and they had slept together; but what happened now was a mystery to him. He wasn't sure what she wanted from him. She hadn't tried to obliviate him this time, that at least was a good sign.

There was a soft knock at his door.

He opened it and Hermione stepped inside.

"I was just wondering where you were." He knew that 'wondering where you were' was just another was of saying 'wondering why you weren't in my bedroom'.

"I wasn't sure if you wanted….if this was a regular thing or…" He started awkwardly.

She studied his face as she slowly drew her wand. She wordlessly cast a spell and he saw the light of a flash from behind him. She turned and left the room. He slowly turned to see what she had done. Where his bed had previously been lay a smoldering pile of ash. A wide grin crept across his face as he grabbed his cloak and headed upstairs to her rooms.

She had made herself clear. She wanted him in her bed that night...every night.

**A/N: sorry, not the best chapter. I keep writing more after this and this one isn't coming as easily. I figured it was time to just give up and post it and move on. I mostly know where the story is going now. For those of you who want to know who is still alive...just hang in there, you'll know just not quite yet. I originally wasn't planning on continuing the story beyond the last chapter...so I set up some rules for myself that I have to work around now (like killing Neville and implying that Hermione had never had sex with a wizard before). Sorry about this bad chapter, I promise the next one will be better. Thank you to everyone who reviewed the story, the reviews are really helping me fine-tune it and giving me more ideas for later on (you'll see). I love them all (especially the long ones). You guys are great.  
**


	8. Family

The day was so beautiful it was almost surreal. The sky was clear and blue and the sun was warm and bright. Hermione sat on a blanket out in the garden with a book and the wind fluttered through her soft brown curls. A young girl sat with her on the blanket, lost in her own book. Simultaneously, they both turned a page.

Dahlia had quickly adapted to her new life. She loved her classes and had even made a few friends, but she was lonely at nights. Most of the children her age still lived at home with their parents and arrived to school by portkey each morning. But she was not like them. This school was her home; she had no parents. The headmistress had noticed the girl's loneliness and had started to allow her to read in her office at night while she worked or sit quietly in the lab while she brewed. Dahlia was grateful for the company. She wasn't sure why the headmistress had taken such an interest in her, but she enjoyed it nonetheless.

Hermione had never had children but she had been something of a mother to the hundreds who had passed through her school. Every student who walked through the doors of this school had been her child in a way. But to this girl, this girl who had no mother, the attachment had a new meaning. This little girl held a special place in her heart. Hermione was an orphan too, orphaned by her adopted family just as much as by her real one. Everyone at the school had seen that this was not the typical student-headmistress relationship and had started treating the two of them as if Hermione was Dahlia's mother. In everything but blood, it was what she had become.

Severus pulled up weeds as he watched them from across the garden. Dahlia put down her book and scribbled something onto a piece of parchment before putting her quill back behind her ear. There was no doubt that she was now Hermione's daughter. She had adopted the woman's pastimes and mannerisms. He was amazed at how quickly the girl learned and how much she picked up. She was quickly turning into a miniature version of Hermione.

A group of other children came outside and Dahlia ran off to play with them. Severus approached the spot on the picnic blanket that she had vacated and sat down to take a break. The two of them watched in silence as the children played. There were two small dark-haired girls around Dahlia's age and a dark-haired boy that looked to be a few years older than the girls. They were not students of Severus' since he only taught the upper levels.

"Do they have a sister in one of my classes?" He could see the resemblance.

"Yes, and two brothers. Then a few more that are too young to be in your classes yet."

"Big family," he remarked.

"Yeah," she replied, smiling slightly, "They have more children than the Weasleys"

It was silent for a moment, broken only by the whistle of the wind and the faint cries of the playing children. He had not expected her to bring up the Weasleys. She never spoke about them. Even she looked surprised that she had said it. For all their numbers, there was only one Weasley still alive….well, if you could consider rotting somewhere deep in the depths of Azkaban as being alive.

Dahlia finished playing and came running back to the picnic blanket and took a seat next to Severus. For some reason, she had taken a liking to the man. The other students her age had seen him stalking around the halls and were intimidated by him. Dahlia wasn't. He had been there on the best day of her life. He had come with the headmistress to take her away from the orphanage and bring her here. In her mind, his was a safe and reassuring presence. And as cold and hard as his eyes were when he taught classes or walked through the hallways, she could always feel them soften and sadden as they looked at her.

He hadn't spoken to her, either at the orphanage or on the way back. He hadn't even spoken to her since she had gotten to Hogwarts. She was alright with that. He didn't need to say anything, just being close to him made her feel safe.

o

o

That night, Severus waited for Hermione in their lab. When she finally arrived, Dahlia was with her. Severus scowled as he watched the girl enter the room. Hermione approached the cauldron he had set up while Dahlia sat down at one of the unused tables towards the edge of the room.

"The lab is not a place for children," he said to her sharply.

"We're not brewing anything dangerous tonight."

"It doesn't matter. Things can happen, accidents can happen. She could knock something over or contaminate something."

"She won't come anywhere near the brewing, she's just going to sit over there and read."

He glanced towards the girl in the corner with an expression of uncertainty on his face.

"She stays," Hermione said firmly.

It was her school, after all. She had the final word.

o

o

From then on, Dahlia accompanied them to the lab each night and quietly did her homework as they brewed. Severus had to admit that her presence had actually been helpful. Before the girl had started attending their brewing sessions, Severus and Hermione had sometimes gotten distracted. Sometimes the steam from the cauldron would soak through her shirt, sometimes he would get too close to her while she was stirring and she would feel his hot breath on her neck, sometimes he couldn't keep himself from touching her and he would end up taking her bent over one of the worktables. Sometimes they finished in time to save whatever potion they were working on, sometimes they did not. The girl being in the room helped them stay focused on their task and the attraction between them was allowed to build as they brewed without any danger of it being acted upon. The girl being in the room meant that they finished their potions and made it upstairs into bed before they lost control.

But tonight, Hermione had other obligations and could not brew. Dahlia had come anyways and sat in her usual spot as Severus brewed alone. He watched the small girl read, her blond hair covering her face from his view. Her hair was not the ethereal glowing silver-blond of the Malfoys. It was a dark, earthy yellow. It was the color of wheat stalks bathed in sunlight.

He turned to chop the valerian roots, before realizing that the potion he was working on needed continuous stirring. He had gotten used to brewing with Hermione, so used to it in fact that he had forgotten what it was like to brew alone. He had forgotten how carefully he needed to plan the order of his actions when there wasn't another person there. He sighed to himself, he really didn't want all his work wasted. After all, ingredients were scarce. He looked across the room to see the girl seated in the corner, reading. She was bent over her book, her hair creating a veil that prevented him from seeing her face.

"Miss Dursley," he said. She looked up. This man had never directly addressed her. But still she said nothing.

"I seem to be needing some assistance, if you would be willing to help."

She was on her feet in an instant.

"Those roots," he motioned to a pile on the other side of the room, "need to be chopped."

She nodded and set to work. He focused on stirring his potion with the intense concentration it required. She gathered the results of her work into a small pile and brought it over to him. The root needed to be added in the next minute or the potion would be useless.

She appeared at his side with the roots she had chopped in her hands. He looked down at them and was horrified. They were cut raggedly and it varying sizes. They were unusable. If he added them into the potion, it would be sure to explode. Of course, she had not started potions lessons yet, she had not known the technique.

He pointed his wand at her hands and the chopped roots vanished. She looked down, disappointed and confused.

"Come," he said, already halfway to the door.

She followed, running to catch up and stayed a few steps behind him as he quickly made his way through the corridors of the school.

He wanted to teach her how to do it right, but this was not Hogwarts. Ingredients were scarce here, either purchased secretly or grown in the garden. Using potions ingredients to teach technique was wasteful and foolish.

Severus stopped as he came to a heavy wooden door and pushed it open to reveal an empty kitchen. Dahlia followed him inside curiously.

She watched wide-eyed as he pulled out several cutting boards and knives as well as a large metal pot. He returned a second later from the pantry with an armful of various herbs and vegetables. Finally, he pulled a chair over to the counter so that she could reach. She climbed up on the chair and he handed her a knife.

Eileen Prince had grown up in a pureblood family. She had learned to cook the way the pureblooded women had for centuries, with a wand. Her mother had taught her the spells and charms to dice, chop, and stew. But then she had gotten herself knocked up by a muggle, a muggle who she had not told she was a witch, a muggle who was furious when he found out.

And so she stood in the kitchen of her husband's house, staring at the ingredients without any idea of how to convert them from their present state to something that could be eaten for dinner. Her husband had taken her wand and would not let her have it back, would not let her use it. She was lost without it. But she had been sorted into Slytherin; she was nothing if not resourceful. She knew she had to adapt. It was either adapt or starve. If it was just her, she might have let herself starve to death, but there was a child growing inside of her and her death would be his as well. And so, she had used the only knowledge she had of cutting down ingredients and combining them, her potions classes. She picked up a small knife and held it in her hand and started dicing just as she had been taught to do.

As a young boy, Severus had helped his mother in the kitchen. She had taught him how to cook. It wasn't until he arrived at Hogwarts and sat through his first potions class, that he realized she had taught him more than that. The knives were awkward in the hands of the first year pureblooded students who had grown up in houses where their mothers muttered spells to prepare dinner. He watched their awkward hands with distain before picking up his own knife and thinly slicing the mandrake root just as he had been taught to slice potatoes. His hands had worked on their own, working from memory. And when he had put everything into the cauldron, he stirred, holding the stirring rod as his mother had taught him to hold a long wooden spoon.

The class watched as he stirred his potion with the perfect pressure, the perfect speed, the perfect angle of his wrist, counting every stroke. He had looked up to see Slughorn's mouth gaping open in amazement. It was then that he realized his mother had taught him much more than how to cook. He had never told his mother that he knew what she had done for him, had never thanked her for his advantage. He knew what would have happened to her if his father had overheard, so he had never risked it.

Severus had stood at the doorway of Spinner's End, about to embark on his journey for Hogwarts for the seventh and final time. Years ago his father had decided he was old enough to make the trip on his own and had forbid his mother from accompanying him. He stood by the front door with his packed trunk beside him as his mother swept the floor and his father drank a beer.

"I won't be coming back," he said.

His father had grunted a response.

"I'm going to become a potions master." He saw the faint flicker of a smile dart across his mother's lips, but she kept her head down and continued her sweeping.

"I'm not paying for it," his father grumbled.

"I'm not asking you to." His schooling would be paid for by the Dark Lord after he took the mark. If only he had realized at the time that he was simply exchanging one abusive master for another.

He had turned and left without a goodbye to either of them, without a thank you to his mother. But she had known that he was to become a potions master and he hoped she understood why.

Severus had never known that he had the desire to pass on this knowledge, but he felt an odd sensation creep into his heart as he moved his knife, demonstrating how to crush the herbs with the flat edge.

"Like this?" Dahlia asked, mimicking his motion.

"Yes, exactly like that."

Dahlia looked up at him.

Severus Snape had never wanted to be a father. He had despised his own father and had taken every precaution to ensure that he did not become a father himself. How could he ever be sure that he wouldn't take after his father? How could he ever be sure that he would not abuse his child? He had done everything within his power to make sure that he would never have the chance to find out.

Severus Snape had done everything a man does if he doesn't want to be a father. He had never married; he had been very careful to never impregnate a woman, although after all the cruciatus he had undergone, in recent years this had probably become superfluous. He was understandably surprised, then, when the girl looked up at him with _that_ look in her eyes. It was _that_ look that told him that he had failed, that no matter how hard he had tried for his goal, he had unknowingly become a father to this girl.

Hermione stood in the doorway watching as Severus stepped behind the little girl and took her hand in his, angling the wooden spoon so that it stirred the stew more thoroughly. He released the girl's hand and watched closely as she made the motion herself. He gave her an approving nod and stepped away. He turned to see Hermione standing in the doorway with a strange expression in her eyes and her lips twisted into a tender smile.

They stood like that with their eyes locked on one another for several minutes. Finally, he spoke.

"Are you hungry? It's almost ready."

She nodded and started rummaging through the cabinets, pulling out a few bowls and a bottle of wine.

The three of them sat at the table and ate.

Dahlia may have been young, but she wasn't naive. She was known for being a quiet child, but what people didn't realize was that she was quiet for a reason. She was an observant child and it was easier to watch people if you kept your mouth shut. She was young, but she noticed things. She didn't miss the way the headmistress smiled at the professor as she sipped her wine. She didn't miss the way the professor's hand slipped under the table, seeking the headmistress' own. She didn't miss the way that after they had cleaned up the kitchen, the professor took off with the headmistress in the direction of her rooms instead of the way he should have gone if he was planning to go to his.

o

o

_A/N: What did you think? Bonus points if you can guess which Weasley is still alive._


	9. A Day in November

Hermione sat at her desk looking over her schedule for the rest of the week. There were so many colored lines that they blurred into one tangled mass. What she wouldn't give for a time-turner. The door opened suddenly and Duncan Smith, the young history professor, barged into her office, messy brown hair framing his freckled cheeks. He was the cute teacher, the one all the girls had crushes on. She could have dated him she had wanted to, but had always avoided the subject with him. He looked too much like Ron, but with that touch of darkness and tenderness and intelligence that Harry had. She had kept her distance from him. He just brought back too many memories. She noted his disheveled state; he was obviously there to talk about something urgent.

"Duncan, is there something I can help you with?" she asked, finishing her sentence and setting down her quill.

He approached her desk, but did not sit.

"I was working with Severus in the garden earlier. His sleeve came up a little and a saw a piece of a dark tattoo on his forearm." He paused and looked at her meaningfully, but she did not reply so her continued, "Hermione, that mark, that's one of _the_ marks, isn't it? One of _their_ marks, of the people who tried to exterminate people like you, people like me?"

She didn't say anything.

"Is he one of them?"

"He _was_ one of them. He hasn't been for some time now."

"And you _know_ that?"

"Yes."

"Beyond any doubt?"

"Yes."

He stared at her.

"I trust him. That should be enough for you. I trust him with my life." The words slipped out of her mind before she could think. They were not her words, but past words of the man that had taught her, that had held so many secrets just so she and her friends could have some shred of a childhood. She added herself to that very short list of powerful wizards who had both protected and commanded Severus Snape. He needed to be protected so that he could protect everyone else.

"If you trust my judgment, you will trust me on this."

"Fine," was the answer that she expected to receive. It was the one she herself had given to Dumbledore. It was the only one to give.

Duncan turned to leave and grabbed the door handle tightly in his fist.

"Do you just trust him because you're sleeping with him?"

She said nothing.

"I've seen him leaving your room early in the morning, arriving at your door late at night. It's not hard to figure out what's going on."

"I wouldn't be sleeping with him if I didn't trust him."

He turned back around to face her.

"Hermione, it's just that…"

"I trust him."

He stood there for a moment, staring deeply into her eyes.

"Ok."

She couldn't fault him. It was how Harry or Ron would have reacted to this situation. There was a part of her relationship with Severus that hadn't felt right without someone questioning her about it.

o

o

The potion bubbled and steamed Severus he worked on it. Dahlia sat on a stool at the work table, watching him. He finished the potion and filled up the vials with the orange liquid. Dahlia watched silently, but bit her lip as though she had something to say. He put the newly-filled vials into the storeroom and began to clean up his work station.

"The Headmistress says that you knew my grandmother."

"Yes."

He looked over at her as she sat there expectantly waiting for him to continue.

"I grew up near her family, down the street."

"What was she like?"

"She was…" What could he tell this little girl about the grandmother she had never known? What could he say that would explain anything?

"I barely knew her. She never liked me much. I was friends with her sister, Lily, for a while…best friends."

"What was Lily like?"

He hesitated. He had never spoken about his first love to anyone.

"She was…" how could you describe Lily? Beautiful and selfish and smart and scared and naive.

"She was incredible." Incredible in a way that no matter what she did to him, it never made him hate her, only hate himself.

"We became friends when we were around your age, before we even started school. We were in the same year. She was smart, all the teachers loved her. She had a lot of friends." He filled in the rest with meaningless details, little stories that meant nothing.

After Dahlia left, he thought back on her grandmother, Petunia. She had been his enemy for so much of his childhood. That was how he would have always remembered her had it not been unsettled by one encounter with her, the last time he had ever seen her.

_November, 1978..._

Severus sat in the near-darkness of the dirty room lit only by the rays of dusty sunlight filtered through the holes in the drawn black curtains. He stared down at the dark mark freshly scorched into his arm. He had come here to escape, to hide, to be alone. He hated this place, had always hated it, but it at least allowed him to be alone with his misery, to wallow in it even.

He wasn't sure what he expected to feel when he finally received the mark, but it wasn't this. It wasn't until he had irreversibly chosen a direction that he had started to question it, to question his own certainty, his own decisions. But it was too late, wasn't it? He had to live with what he had done.

Maybe he had expected to feel proud, proud that he had finally accomplished what he had set out to accomplish, that he had finally been deemed worthy. All he felt was a sick feeling in his stomach and he wasn't sure why. He had promised Lucius that he would come to the manor for a reception after the initiation, but he had come here instead, to Spinner's End. His parents had moved, but unable to sell the place had simply let it to fall down of its own accord. It hadn't yet, but the foundations cracked and leaned; it was only a matter of time.

Maybe he had just wanted to be close to where it all started, to find the beginning of the path that had led him here so that he could untangle it like a knot until he finally understood. He had been drifting towards Tom Riddle and his followers for years really, but had always put off any firm commitments, had always side-stepped Lucius' pressure to take the mark. He had always flirted with the dark, but it wasn't until last week, until the article in the Prophet that he had finally let himself be swallowed by it.

He took the newspaper out of his pocket and unfolded it on the splintering table. There she was, looking beautiful, just like always. They hadn't been friends for a while, not since the fight a few years ago. As much as her dating James Potter had bothered him, he had always considered it a temporary condition. She would see reason….eventually. She would see James for the cruel, pretentious bastard that he was and realize how silly her fight with Severus had been and then, and then she would come back to him. But that black and white clipping crushed this dream, tore them to shreds and burned those shreds and spit on the ashes. She was engaged. She was engaged to James Potter. As soon as he had seen the article, he had made his decision. She was never coming back to him. If she was going to take an irreversible step, then so would he.

Severus pulled his sleeve back down and left the house, walking down the street he had not walked down in years, but following a path that he had followed more times than he could count. He passed through the bushes, drawn to the place as he had always been drawn to it, drawn to the memories. He needed them now, to comfort him as nothing else could, to help him make sense of his life. As he stepped through the bushes, he was surprised to see that his destination was already occupied. A woman stood, staring absently at the rusty swing set as it creaked in the slight breeze. She looked up at him and they stood there for a few long moments, staring at each other as time stretched out between them.

Blond hair fell limply around her sharp features. He would never have recognized her, had he seen her anywhere but here. But in this context, he could see the face of the little girl that had once scolded her sister for flying too high in the face of the woman that stood before him. She stared at him, simply stared with none of the antipathy or resentment that she had always looked at him with.

"Petunia," he said softly, more to himself than to her. She did not reply.

"I heard about your parents," he said. It had been in the article about the engagement, how her parents had died recently. They had stumbled into a jewelry store that was being held up, a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The funeral had been several weeks ago; Lily had gotten engaged soon after.

He stood at the playground staring at the woman who had once been a girl, who had once been his neighbor. How had two people who had known each other so little, who had barely ever shared more than a few words come to despise each other so much?

She had blamed him for taking her sister away into a world in which she could not follow. He had blamed her for causing those first cracks of disagreement between him and Lily that had eventually grown large enough to split them apart. They had blamed each other for everything _she_ had ever done to them. But it had never been their fault, either of theirs, it had always been _hers_.

Lily had tried to make peace with her sister, she had tried to steer Severus away from the path she had seen him headed towards, but in the end she had given up on both of them.

Petunia seemed unsure, lost. She had been a bossy, demanding girl, always so sure of herself and now she simply seemed broken.

"Would you like some tea?" She offered, turning towards the house. He followed her, unsure of why. They entered the small muggle kitchen. Boxes lay piled on the floor, drawers sat half-open and half-empty. Petunia had obviously come back to take care of her parents' estate.

"Where's Lily?" he asked, peering into a box.

"She came back for the funeral, but she's in some sort of training program…she couldn't take more than a few days off of work."

Auror training, of course. As always she had gone and left her sister behind. Lily had been her parents' favorite and Petunia had been the one left to clean up the mess. She had never been as pretty as her sister, had never been as popular. Severus could sympathize.

Petunia made tea for them in the half-furnished kitchen, automatically, meachanically, without even looking at it. She moved as if on autopilot, staring across the kitchen while her hands moved on their own. When she finished, she placed one of the cups in front of him and sat down at the table.

"Something happened, didn't it? Between you and her?" She asked as she sipped her tea and stared absently out the window. "One summer, you stopped coming over, your bird stopped coming to the window. She never told me why."

He sipped his tea before answering.

"There's a war going on in our world…she and I are on opposite sides of it." It was more than that of course, but he had no desire to explain further.

She nodded, staring down into her tea.

"Something I wouldn't understand."

"Yes."

What was he doing in a muggle's house drinking tea? He was a death eater now, he wasn't supposed to do things like this. He was supposed to be killing muggles, not having tea with them. The thought occurred to him that maybe he should kill the woman. Killing himself seemed like a better idea.

She picked up the empty teacups and walked over to the sink to wash them. He could have offered to do it for her, to use a spell, but he didn't. He watched as she picked up the sponge and scrubbed the cups with the soapy water. He walked over to her as she picked up the dish towel to dry it. He didn't know what he was going to do until he had already done it. She stood facing the sink as he stepped up behind her, placing his hands on the counter on either side of her. He pressed himself up against her as he lowered his head down and kissed her neck. Her eyes closed and her head fell back against him. The teacup slipped out of her hands and shattered into the sink.

She turned around and returned the kiss, desperately, passionately. He bit her lip and ground his body against hers, pinning her against the counter. He had wanted to hurt Lily as she had hurt him. She would never find out about this of course, but it made him feel better just to do it. He had no doubt that Petunia was responding for the same reasons.

He pulled away and it ended just as suddenly as it had started. He turned to leave and although he could have easily fixed the teacup with a simple spell, he left it broken in the sink. He walked out the door, not bothering to close it behind him.

"You still love her, don't you?" He heard her say behind him.

"Yes." The cold terrible truth that he had desperately been trying not to admit to himself. Always.

"I do too," she whispered so quietly that it was almost completely swallowed by the sound of the wind. She would love her sister, no matter what she ever did to her.

_A/N: Thanks to everyone who reviewed. Some of you got bonus points, but I can't tell you who yet...not for at least a few more chapters. The scene between Snape and Petunia started off as an idea for its own story, but I wasn't sure where else to go with it, so I decided to include it in this one instead. I thought that since Petunia was Dahlia's grandmother, it might be appropriate to give a little more insight into her. Hope you liked it._


	10. Marks of War

The early morning sun came in the window, illuminating the body of the woman who lay next to him in the bed. She stirred slightly and the sheets fell around her, revealing the upper half of her body.

"Hermione, Are you awake?" He whispered.

"Yes."

Severus ran his finger over the long, pale scar that ran across her forearm.

"You never told me where you got this one."

"I don't remember," she said quickly, pulling her arm away from his touch.

He knew every scar on her body, every mark. He knew the one under her chin was from Bella's knife, the one on her abdomen from the Dolshov at the Department of Mysteries, but there was one she had never explained. That scar on her forearm always caused the conversation to be changed or her to remember a letter she had needed to send right away. She pulled on a robe and left him alone in the bedroom.

o

o

When he finished his shower, he found her back in the bedroom, waiting for him.

"Severus," she approached him, "I was thinking that maybe you should take the day off tomorrow and I'll teach your defense classes."

He eyed her suspiciously.

"It's just that usually once the students reach fifteen, I get them all together in defense class and tell them about the war. They normally ask a lot of questions about it, about my role in it. I thought maybe I should continue to give the lecture so that you don't have to answer any awkward questions."

"You mean, they don't know about the war until then?" He asked, shocked.

"No, we tell them about it in their first year here, but they're so young then that it's more of a rough outline of it. I leave out a lot of the details then, the atrocities that were committed, the treatment of prisoners. When they get old enough to handle the details, I tell them."

He could imagine how hard it must be for her, he knew how much she avoided speaking of it even with him.

"If you were to give the lecture, they would most likely ask some questions that you would not want to answer." Duncan had found out, but they had managed to keep his mark a secret from the students and the other faculty.

He agreed that she should be the one to give the lecture.

Hermione stood in front of a packed room of students. This was their largest classroom and they had squeezed an entire year of students in it for this lecture. This was her least favorite part of the year. She hated talking about the war with people who had played no part in it. She hated the looks of disgust and pity and fear on their faces as she spoke of the atrocities she had seen, had experienced, had even committed.

Most of these students had been little more that babies at the time, running carefree in their backyards, kissing their parents. They probably hadn't even shown any sign of magic yet as she was being tortured at the end of Bellatrix Lestrange's wand, had been held with a knife to her throat. She hated talking about this. But they needed to know, and who else was there to tell them? They needed to know why they needed to pay attention in their defense classes. They needed to know where the temptation of the dark arts could lead. Who else was there to tell them? She took a deep breath and began her story.

Halfway through her story, the door of the classroom opened. Severus strode through the crowd of students and she pulled him over to the side and whispered in a hushed tone.

"What are you doing here?"

"They need to know. I want to tell them," he said seriously.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

She stayed to the side and watched warily as he strode to the front of the classroom. The students watched with curiosity as he slowly unbuttoned his robes and hung them over the back of the chair. They had never seen their professor in only pants and a shirt before. He now stood in front of them wearing black pants, black boots, and a crisp, white shirt. They watched as he unbuttoned the buttons of his left cuff and then pulled up the white sleeve to reveal the black mark burned into the flesh of his forearm. It was a mark they had only heard about, had only seen sketched on a chalkboard, but all the same, they knew what it meant.

"Does anyone know what this is?" He asked calmly, staring out into the sea of students. He had never heard a classroom so silent. There was not so much as a whisper. It seemed as if the entire classroom was holding their breath.

"I asked a question. Does anyone know what this is?"

There was one hand, raised slowly and tentatively. It was Scott, a student of his.

"It's the dark mark, sir" the boy answered with trepidation.

"That is correct. What else can you tell me about it?"

Scott looked around him before he realized that it was he who was meant to answer the question.

"It's the mark that Voldemort gave his followers, the death eaters."

To Scott's relief, the girl sitting to his right raised her hand.

"Are you a death eater, sir?"

"I _was_ a death eater."

As Hermione watched, she realized that Severus wasn't doing this so that the kids could be better educated about the war and he wasn't doing this to spare her the pain of doing so herself. He was doing this for himself. He was trying to get some kind of understanding, some kind of forgiveness from these children. If they could accept his sins and forgive him, if they could at least understand why he did what he did, then maybe one day he would be able to forgive himself.

Another student raised a cautious hand

"It's just that everything we've heard…it doesn't sound like the sort of thing that you can just _quit_."

"No. At the end of last summer, I faked my own death and disappeared. I came here."

Another hand went up.

"I though he could sense his followers through the mark? Why doesn't he know you're still alive?"

"That's a very good question. Does anyone know how this mark differs from normal dark marks?"

It was Scott who raised his hand. There was a nervous flicker of his eyes towards the headmistress as he spoke and Severus suspected that the boy had been doing more reading into the ways of the Dark Lord than would be considered appropriate.

"Isn't it supposed to move, sir?"

"Yes. I brewed a variation of the draught of the living dead that can be applied as a topical cream. If I apply it to the mark, the mark doesn't communicate with him and he doesn't know I'm alive."

"So up until last summer, you were a Death Eater?"

"Yes and no. I have had the mark since I was eighteen, but the large majority of that time has been spent as a spy."

"Have you ever killed anyone?" Scott again, not making eye contact.

"Yes."

"What's it like?"

"Horrible. Tearing your soul is worse than any physical pain I have ever experienced. It's the knowledge of what you're doing combined with the damage it does to your soul."

There was another hand, the girl again.

"Why?" Why had he taken the mark to begin with? The simplest question and the hardest to answer; it was the only question worth answering at all.

"Because we can never fully see the consequences of our actions when we set off down a path, because I was eighteen and naive enough to accept the gifts and praise I was offered without asking what was wanted in return, because I was angry and alone and wanted something to fight for, anything."

The students continued to stare at him as if they wanted more.

"There is that final decision, the final push that you look at as the reason a choice is made, but there are a hundred separate choices that lead up to you being in a position to make that choice. It was a slow process of drifting towards the darkness. There are little choices- who you sit next to at lunch, which book you read, things like that. These choices seem miniscule at the time, but they add up to the direction your life will take. Sometimes you don't even see it. Sometimes other people can see where you're going before you ever do. Sometimes, by the time you realize where you ended up, it's too late to turn back."

The lesson ended and Hermione left the classroom without waiting for him. He reached her office to find her already there, staring out the window. He approached her and stood beside her as she stared out the glass as the younger grades playing in the grassy field below. He said nothing but simply stood by her. Finally she spoke.

"I've lived for ten years knowing that all this could be destroyed at any moment."

She had always been plagued by fears of failure when she was a student, but the scale of her failure know was far greater than anything she could have imagined back then.

"Hermione, I think you don't give yourself enough credit. I think that what you have created is more resilient than you think it is."

"I hope so. I really hope so."


	11. And It Begins Again

11: And it Begins Again

A year and a half had passed since Severus and Dahlia had come into Hermione's life. They spent holidays together, the three of them. When everyone else from the school had gone home to spend it with their families, Severus, Hermione, and Dahlia celebrated in the Headmistress' quarters. For all intents and purposes, they were a family. Six months earlier, Severus had tried to make it official. He had asked Hermione to marry him, but she had refused. She would share her bed with him each night, she would tell him her secrets, she would listen to him talk until the early hours of the morning, but she would not be his wife. She had not told him why.

Dahlia helped Severus brew. She stirred in silence, sneaking occasional glances across the room at the professor. He stared at an open book on the table, but the page had not been turned in over an hour. His mind was obviously elsewhere. It was not uncommon for the two of them to brew together. The headmistress had been leaving the school more and more often. Dahlia didn't know where she was going, only that there was an ever increasing seriousness in her face each time she returned.

Dahlia broke the silence to ask Severus where Hermione was. He responded that the headmistress had some business to take care of away from the school and would be back soon. He told her it was nothing to worry about, but she didn't miss the way he kept sneaking glances at the clock. And she didn't miss the look of relief on his face when the door finally opened and the headmistress stepped inside, still wearing her heavy traveling cloak.

o

o

Severus studied the look on Hermione's face as she stepped in the door. There was no warm greeting from her tonight, only an anxious nod and a terse statement.

"I'll be in my office when you finish brewing."

In another half hour he had finished and climbed the stairs to her rooms. He entered her office to find her sitting at her desk. There was a collection of newspaper clippings covering the large wooden surface. Some of the photos in the clippings moved while others stayed stationary- collected from both the muggle and magical press. He stood beside the desk and scanned the array of print: murders, disasters, terrorist attacks. He had had his suspicions, but seeing them all together like this left no doubt in his mind.

"They're going after muggles again," he murmured.

"Yes," she replied, allowing a few moments of silence before she continued, "It seems that power is easier to hold onto in times of war, if you can unite your followers by fighting against a common enemy. Voldemort's rule could only last so long without an enemy, without war."

o

o

o

A few nights later, Duncan entered the headmistress' office. His usual easy smile was gone, replaced by a look of pale concern.

"A student, Marcus Robinson, he never came back from Christmas break."

"Have you tried to contact his family?"

"There was no reply. We sent someone to their house and there was no sign of them."

She nodded, staring absently out the window.

"Headmistress, I know that it's probably nothing, but I can't help worrying….people don't just disappear like that."

She closed her eyes and brought her hand up to massage her temple.

"No, no they don't. I'll contact alumni outside of the school, see if they can look for him."

A search center was set up in the ballroom within the hour. Wizards and witches who had graduated from the school poured in to volunteer their time to find the student. Twenty-four hours of the search effort had passed. The more time that went by, the more the chances went up that something had happened.

There was a commotion from downstairs, shouting and heavy movements. A breathless wizard raced into the room.

"The found him. They're taking him to the infirmary." Hermione raced down the hall with Severus a half-step behind her. They burst into the infirmary just in time to see two wizards dragging a body into one of the private rooms. At a glance, Severus' first impression was that the boy was dead. He lifted the body from one of the men that carried it and helped the other to set it down on the small cot. It was only after he felt the arm he held spasm slightly in his grasp that he realized he was not holding a corpse.

The boy spasmed again. The after-effects of the cruciatus were unmistakable. Someone handed him several vials of potion and he forced them down the boy's throat. He could feel Hermione working beside him, checking the boy for signs of internal damage. Several other people he did not know worked on the boy as well. Severus studied the patterns of cuts and burns on the boy's skin. They left no doubt; he could recognize the work of death eaters when he saw it. He raised his head and met Hermione's gaze. Her look told him that she had come to the same conclusion.

"We need to know what happened," he whispered.

The headmistress told everyone in the room to take a step back from the body.

"Ennervate."

His eyelids fluttered for a second, his head lolled to one side and then he was still again.

"Ennervate." She cast it again.

This time his eyelids fluttered and stayed open. He looked around him, panicked.

"It's all right, you're safe. Can you tell us what happened?"

"I was….shopping with my family in muggle London…" He paused to gasp for air. "A group of cloaked wizards appeared and…" He trailed off and his eyes drifted shut. A second later they snapped open. "I pulled out my wand to… my family, my family was there and I had to…." He seized into a fit of coughing and blood trickled down his lip. "They saw me and took me….they wanted to know things." His eyes shut again and his body remained still. No one moved. The word torture hung unspoken in the air.

They healed him as much as they could and then the headmistress asked them to wait outside. She shut the door behind them and sat in the small wooden chair beside the bed and watched the boy sleep, breaths coming shallow and irregular. How could she have let this happen? She knew that she shouldn't wake the boy again before his body was ready, but each passing moment put them in greater and greater danger. She sat there for several hours before the boy's eyes opened again. He looked around slowly, taking in the details of the room before he finally looked at her.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he said in a hoarse whisper.

"What did you tell them, Marcus?" She was startled to hear her own voice so calm and soothing when her insides were churning with fear.

"I didn't want to…I didn't want to tell them anything."

"I know, sweetie, I know. They hurt you, you had to tell them. It's just very important that I know exactly what you said to them."

o

o

Severus waited with the other faculty members, staring at the closed door. Its smooth wooden surface taunted him. What was happening on the other side? No one spoke. No one seemed to be able to do so much as breathe until they knew exactly how bad it was. This had been doomed to fail from the beginning…some secrets were just too big to be kept. It seemed like all this time they had been waiting, just biding their time until they were discovered. Finally, the headmistress emerged from the room, shutting the door slowly and softly behind her. She approached the anxious looking group of teachers. Her face was void of emotion. When she spoke, she spoke evenly, betraying nothing.

"They know this school exists…but not its location." They were safe…but for how long?

"They're looking for us now," she told them, "It's only a matter of time."

She left the room as the teacher discussed additional wards and a schedule of patrol duty. Severus gave his input and then quickly followed her to her office. He found her inside standing by the window. It had gotten dark outside and the only light came from a dim lamp she had lit. He shut the door behind him and stood across the room from her.

"I tried to protect them, I tried to hide them."

"Hermione, this was not your fault."

"He's sixteen! He's a child!" she screamed in anger, picking up a book and throwing it against the wall. The book slammed into the heavy surface with a thud, sliding down and landing open on the floor, pages splayed and bent in all directions.

"And how old were you the first time you fought? How old were you at the ministry? You weren't much older than that the first time you were tortured, the first time you tasted pain from the end of Bella's wand."

"That was different."

"No, it wasn't. It was only different because it was happening to you. It's always easier to be the one in danger than to be the one waiting, worried."

She took a few moments to collect herself.

"What do we do now?" he asked somberly. Despite her breakdown, he had faith that she had a plan; she wouldn't be Hermione Granger if she didn't. She paced to the corner of her office and spun the globe that sat there, letting it rotate a few times before reaching out her hand to still its motion. She stared down at it as she spoke.

"We do exactly what they did. We're them now, don't you see? We're the small rebel force trying to topple the government. They did a good job, didn't they? They taught us well." A twisted smile crept its way onto her face. He waited for her to continue.

"We form small groups, send them out in raids. Death Eaters begin mysteriously disappearing…their families too. Rumors will start being whispered. The ministry won't believe it at first, not until it's too late. We take the Prophet, then the Ministry, then finally Hogwarts." He watched the fire flash in her eyes.

"They taught their lessons well and I have a_ very_ good memory."


	12. Whispers, Rumors, Prophecies and Shadows

12: Whispers, Rumors, Prophecies, and Shadows

-

_Two men stood in the dark alley, both with long cloaks and faces hidden securely by the shadows._

_"There was another killing," one whispered to the other._

_"How do you know? I haven't heard anything about it."_

_"My brother-in-law works for the ministry. They haven't released anything about it yet."_

_"I heard they didn't mean to let the public know about the last one either, but it leaked out."_

_"Did you hear they found the imprint of a feather charred into the floor next to where the body lay?"_

_"No. What does that mean?"_

_"Some people are saying that the Order of the Phoenix is back."_

_"I thought they were all wiped out."_

_"Apparently they weren't. All the victims so far have been Death Eaters of relatives of Death Eaters."_

_"Why hasn't there been anything about it in the Prophet?"_

_"The Prophet?" the man snorted, "The Prophet prints what the ministry tells it to print."_

_"True."_

_"They aren't done yet, take my word for it."_

_"Do you think there will be more killings?"_

_"I would bet money on it."_

o

o

o

He followed her through the dark forest. They had apparated there, he didn't know what forest it was, but they made their way through the maze of tangled shadows the trees cast in the moonlight. She had not told him where they were going, but wherever it was, it was secure. They had been walking at least twenty minutes from the apparition point. She made her way through the forest quickly and quietly. Even in the near-darkness, she planted her feet with a confident sureness; she had been this way before. Finally they reached the edge of the wood and the canopy of tall trees gave way to an inky expanse of night sky. The stars reflected in the glassy surface of the lake, making it impossible to tell which way was up and which was down. His eye scanned along the edge of the water as it curled into the distance. Right before the point that the shimmer of the water disappeared into the blackness of the night, he could make out the faint outline of a cabin on the shore.

She had stopped walking and waited by the water for him.

"Who lives here? Why have you brought me here?"

"I want you to meet my spy."

"Your spy?"

"Surely you don't think I would wage a war without inside information on the Dark Lord's activities?" Who could it be? Who would be disloyal? His mind raced through the lists of names, but he could think of no one. As far as he had known, he had been alone in his disloyalty to the Dark Lord's regime.

They continued towards the cabin. Severus could make out a faint glow from inside the structure and a few whisps of smoke making their way out of the chimney. Whoever they were meeting was already there.

Hermione opened the door and he followed her inside. There were no interior partitions and the inside of the cabin was made up only of one large room. A dying fire smoldered in the fireplace, giving little light to the large room. There was only a few broken pieces of furniture, this cabin was evidently not lived in and served only as a location for meetings such as this one.

At first he thought he had been mistaken and that no one waited for them in that empty room, but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room, he saw a stirring of movement in the shadows. Hermione pointed her wand at the fireplace and a log shifted, giving renewed strength to the flames. The light in the room flared, illuminating the figure on the other side of the room. Even with the brighter light in the room, it was hard to make out many details. The figure sat on a splintered wooden bench, facing away from them. All he could make out was a tattered black cloak and long, stringy black hair. The figure stood slowly and turned to face them. The spy raised its head to look at them, black hair falling away from a face Severus strained to recognize. He thought he…but it couldn't be. The face was familiar, but changed. The circumstances, the setting was all wrong, but there was an unmistakable glint in those black eyes that stared back at him from across the room.

His eye traveled downwards from the taut face to the drawn wand that was pointed at him.

"Miss Parkinson."

"What's _he_ doing here?" She asked in a gruff voice he did not recognize.

"He's with us," Hermione replied calmly and firmly, stepping forward, "you can put the wand away."

His eyes darted from one woman's face to the other. These two women were enemies, had been since they were eleven years old. Never in a million years would he have thought that one of them would include the other in any sort of an 'us'.

His first thought was that Hermione had converted to the other Dark because never never never never would Pansy Parkinson place herself on the side of muggles and muggle-borns. The possibility of Hermione Granger being seduced by the Dark Arts seemed almost probable when compared to the possibility of Pansy Parkinson turning her back on everything Pureblood society had brought her up to believe. But another glance told him that this was not the Pansy Parkinson he had known. This was not the immaculately primped girl in designer robes with her nose in the air. This was a woman in torn and bloody robes gritting her teeth as her greasy hair fell across her face. This was a woman with only pain in her eyes.

She put her wand away and took a step towards them. Severus could see a limp in that step. She observed the dart of his eyes down towards her leg.

"The Dark Lord is not happy about the attacks. He suspects that information is being leaked." Severus cringed. He had been there. He had known that pain.

But this woman…he did not know this woman.

o

There had always been a lot of things that no one had known about Pansy Parkinson. For instance, hardly anyone had known about her brother, the one person who meant more than anything to her.

People had always thought she admired Draco, but he was nothing compared to her brother. She had been enamored with Draco for seventeen years, but she had loved her brother her entire life.

Her brother was eight years older than her. He left for France to continue his studies before she even started Hogwarts. She had written to him every day while she was in school and he had always written back. She saw him during summers, sometimes on holidays, but it wasn't nearly enough. In each letter, she begged him to return to England, but he was happy where he was.

He had returned to the country for a few weeks when she announced her engagement two years ago. She had proudly introduced him to her fiancée. Draco had talked with him, introduced him to the Dark Lord's ideals. He had taken the mark, but returned to France.

She did not see him again for eight months. Roughly three months after his return to France, the letters had stopped coming. The letters that had come so regularly since she was eleven years old had completely stopped. What if something had happened to him? How could she live without her brother? Each day that passed without an owl at her window caused her heart to break just a little more

Then one day she had returned home to find him in her kitchen.

She ran to embrace him but was stopped by the expression of fear on his face.

"I'm in love, Pansy," he said slowly, "I'm getting married."

"That's great," she replied, confused by the look on his face.

"Is it Monica Avery?" The girl their parents had always planned on him marrying.

"No."

"Who is it?"

"A woman I work with in France."

The look on his face told her that there was more. She approached him slowly.

"She's….she's not a pureblood. Her parents are muggles."

She stopped in shock.

"A mudblood. You're marrying a mudblood?"

"Pansy, I love her. It doesn't matter to me."

"But mom and dad said that mudbloods…"

"It doesn't matter, Pans," he interrupted her, "she's amazing and anything they said to us about mudbloods they must have been wrong because she's incredible." How could he say that?

"They're going to kill you," she stated, blinking.

"They're going to try."

"Why did you come here?"

"I had to tell you. I probably won't see you, at least not for a while." So that was what it was going to come down to?

"Take me with you." He meant more to her than anything, she would throw her beliefs out the window…for him.

"It's too dangerous, Pansy, I'll let you know once things settle down a little."

And he was gone.

That night when she heard the door open, she already knew what Draco had come to tell her.

"There's a price on you brother's head."

They had fought that night. He had insisted that she disown her brother. She had refused.

"He's my brother. I love him. I can't."

"My mother disowned her sister for marrying a muggle-born."

"I'm not your mother." Oh how she had wanted to be. She had spent the better part of her life emulating Narcissa Malfoy. This was the final test and she found not only that she could not pass it, but that she did not want to.

She prayed that her brother would not be found...but he was.

She was there when her brother stood before the Dark Lord, bound and wandless. She was there when the Dark Lord proclaimed his sentence and ordered Draco to carry it out as a show of loyalty. She was there, restrained by arms whose owners she could not see as Draco approached the prisoner.

She could do nothing but watch as her fiancee cast the spell that sent her brother limp and lifeless to the floor.

If she had seen pain in his eyes as he cast the spell, if she had seen regret…things might have ended differently. But she saw nothing. He did not love her. He never had. If he could kill her beloved brother in cold blood than she was nothing to him, nothing but a possession.

She walked as if in a dream, only distantly aware of her surroundings. She saw only pain, the rest of the world was relegated to blurs and shadows at the corner of her vision. Finally, something came into focus. It was herself. She stood in her bedroom in front of a full-length mirror. She studied the reflection. Besides the look of anguish on her face, she looked perfect. She wore her finest robes, exquisitely tailored from the most expensive material. With the help of charms and an eating disorder, she filled them out in all the right places and none of the wrong ones. Five house-elves had spent a half-hour on her hairstyle that morning. Her makeup was immaculate. Her eyes drifted down to the large diamond engagement ring that sparkled on her finger. She had done it. After a lifetime of sucking up and playing dumb and making herself pretty, she had finally become the perfect pureblood woman. She had the engagement ring to prove her success.

She had been _everything_ they had wanted her to be…and then they had killed her brother.

The next thing she knew she was waiting in the Malfoy manor, fingering a silver knife that she had found on the table. They really shouldn't leave weapons lying around. She waited until Draco got home and then she stabbed him through the heart.

She looked up, blood still dripping from the knife, to see Hermione Granger standing on the other side of the body.

"Punching Draco in the face my third year felt fantastic…I can only imagine how good stabbing him must have felt."

Hermione Granger, the girl who embodied everything she had been taught to hate…..taught by a world that had betrayed her.

"Your other revenge won't be so easy. Draco committed the act, but another gave the order."

Easy? It was impossible. She hadn't even dared consider it. Her plan was to kill herself after killing Draco. But if it were possible… She hadn't thought to be that ambitious, she hadn't dared.

"What do you want?" The classic Slytherin question, the one they taught you to ask from your first day of your first year. Never deal with anyone unless you know exactly what they want from you, because they always want something.

"I want you to join the Dark Lord. I want you to spy for me. I want you to help me bring about his downfall."

A month ago she would have spit on this girl and called her foul names. But that was a month ago. It wasn't that she didn't still believe in pureblood supremacy, it was that it and everything else were secondary to the need for revenge. She would ally herself with anyone, serve any master as long as she had a chance at making the bastard pay for the death of her brother.

"Whatever you need from me is yours." Her deal with the devil, selling her soul for a little revenge.

"I'll clean up here, get rid of all evidence you were ever here. Go see Voldemort. I will contact you when I need you."

She had stood before the Dark Lord the very next day. She had left her tailored robes at home, instead altering and old robe of Draco's to fit her. It was the first day she could remember that she had left the house without doing her makeup, without casting her usual fifteen spells to get her hair perfect and shiny. Her eyes were red from crying. She had just lost her fiancé, after all.

"My condolences, Lady Parkinson. Draco's death was most unfortunate. You are, however, a woman of impeccable breeding. You will find another worthy of your hand in marriage."

"I will not marry, ever. I wish to take Draco's place. I wish to serve you."

She pulled back the sleeve of her robe, exposing her bare forearm, making her intentions clear.

He considered her for a moment. He knew her kind and had little use for her in his ranks. She would have to prove him wrong. She thought for a moment that he was going to deny her, but then felt the searing in her arm. She was in.

Pansy knew nothing of war. She had never paid attention in school. A model pureblood woman did not want to be a challenge to her husband. She had wanted to be a model pureblood woman, so she had spent her time flipping through magazines instead of text books. She had spent her entire life trying to be Narcissa Malfoy. Those skills would not help her now. She needed a new role model.

She followed the Bellatrix Lestrange out of the room.

"What do you want?" The woman asked, turning on her in the hallway.

"I want you to teach me," she managed to squeak out.

"And why would I do that? What makes you think a little slip of a girl like you is worth my time?" sneered Bella, making it clear that she had better places to spend her time than on training a spoiled debutante like Pansy.

"I killed Draco." The truth. No one who had not spent the better part of their time observing the Malfoy family would have dared. But Pansy had been watching. She had known of the Black sisters' plan to fight for the Dark Lord together. She had known of how Lucius has wanted his wife to be a proper pureblood woman and remain in the background while he did the fighting. She knew of Bella's hatred of Lucius. Bella had always acted outwardly kind towards her nephew, but her eyes had narrowed each time his back was turned. Draco Malfoy was the living reminder of the life her sister had chosen over her.

"Why would you do something like that?" Pansy could tell she had shocked the woman.

"He wouldn't let me do fight. He wanted me to be his mother."

Bellatrix had taken Pansy under her wing, had taught her to fight. Pansy, who had never been as dumb as she had led people to believe she was, had soaked up every lesson.

o

o

Severus could tell from the interaction between the women that they had been meeting fairly frequently. Pansy passed on lists of names and locations. He did not ask how she got the information. He did not want to know.

"The Azkaban prisoner you inquired about…"

Hermione's eyes snapped up anxiously.

"Still alive."

Hermione nodded and they went back to their business.

"I have something for you…something I thought you might be interested in," Pansy said, pulling an object out of her bag. She opened her fist to reveal a small orb in the palm of her hand. Severus squinted to read the tag in the low light. All he could make out was "H. J. Potter, 2008" before it passed from Pansy's hand to Hermione's.

It seemed to glow faintly in Hermione's hand, but only for an instant before she threw it violently into the fire. The glass shattered and hissed in the flames.

"Why did you do that?" Pansy asked, outraged, "I risked my life to steal that for you. Didn't you want to know what it said? What if it was important?"

"I don't believe in prophecies," Hermione said coldly, staring into the fire. Her only problem was that other people did.

Severus shared Pansy's indignation.

"Did you read the label?" He rounded on her.

"Yes."

"It said Potter."

"I know."

"H. J. Potter."

"I said I read it."

"If it's about Potter…"

"Harry's dead."

"What if he's not."

"Trust me, he is."

"They don't make prophecies about dead people, Hermione."

"They maybe someone else has the same name."

He shook his head. There had only been one Potter line in the wizarding world. Plus, the person would have to have the remarkably coincidental initials of H.J.

"Prophecies do nothing but give people false hope." If the prophecy had never existed, if people had not looked to a young wizard, barely of age to save them from the darkness, then maybe they would have fought harder. Maybe they wouldn't have given up the instant he died. She had never believed in divination. She had achieved everything she had ever done by intelligence and hard work. There had been no place for luck, no place for fate.

Pansy glanced again to where the glass lay shattered on the hearth. She sighed, standing up and gathering her cloak around her.

"What do you need me to do?"

"I need you to get closer to the Dark Lord. I need a list of strengths and weaknesses of all of the inner circle."

Pansy sighed and left, still limping.

Severus followed Hermione through the woods. The events of tonight had caused a cold chill to make its way down his spine. How many times had he reenacted a similar scene with Dumbledore. How many times had Dumbledore asked him to put his life on the line for the greater good? How many times had he walked knowingly into danger? Hermione's thoughts had evidently drifted the same way as she slowed her pace and spoke.

"I promised myself I would never do this, that I would never be like him. When I first started this, I just knew that there had to be a better way. There isn't. It's a war, some must die so that the greater good can live on. I resented him for it and people will resent me for this, but there's no other way. Is one life worth a peaceful future? What about ten? What about a hundred? Every piece I ask each person to risk, to give up, kills me, but I don't know how else to do this. Someone has to bear the burden of asking the impossible."

They had walked in silence for a while.

"What's next?" he whispered in the dark.

"More raids. More surprise attacks."

She had kept her word. She was twisting their own tactics back on them. He could hear the twisted smile in her voice even in the dark.

"It's always easier, isn't it? To be the rebels instead of the establishment? To operate in the shadows instead of in the light of day? To create chaos instead of keeping order? It's easier to operate anonymously, when you have nothing to lose and everything to gain."

o

o

_A/N: Glad you guys liked the last chapter. Thank you to everyone who reviewed. It seemed a few chapters ago that a lot of people were interested in finding out who was still alive, so I'm starting to introduce some familiar faces back in to the story. I've known for a while that I wanted Hermione to have a spy so that Severus could see a reflection of who he had been. A lot of this story is about reoccurring patterns in a new generation. I had a really hard time figuring out who the spy would be. I knew that I wanted it to be a Slytherin who would have somehow gotten disenchanted with Voldemort's regime and that it had to be personal. Once I started thinking about Pansy, I started getting interested in her. There really needs to be more good Pansy stories out there.  
_


	13. Puzzles and Games

13: Puzzles and Games

Forks and glasses clinked musically in the lavish restaurant. Candlelight sparked off the polished surfaces and quiet laughter seemed to echo softly through the room. The food was spectacular and the fine wine flowed liberally. Lee Jordan had made a successful career for himself in sports casting. He was currently the top rated quittich announcer and was used to dinners like this one in places like these. Tonight's dinner was being paid for by a broomstick company, eager for him to endorse their products. The president of the company was there as well as the manager of the league. They had both brought several attractive witches.

Lee Jordan excused himself and walked through the narrow hallway towards the restroom. The restroom was no less opulent than the rest of the establishment. The black marble countertops and the gleaming gold fixtures were cleaned and polished to perfection. Lee relieved himself and was washing his hands when he heard the door open behind him. He looked up, into the mirror and saw the figure that had entered in the reflection. The figure said nothing, but lowered her hood.

"Hello Hermione," he said, watching her reflection in the mirror. She had grown up since he had last seen her, but the resemblance was unmistakable.

"Hello Lee."

"What do you need?"

"I need a journalist."

He considered her for a moment.

"A journalist isn't worth much without a paper."

"We have the _Prophet_. They'll print whatever you write. I would suggest using a pseudonym...River, perhaps."

He studied her in the mirror for a moment, his back still towards her.

"Alright, what do you need me to do?"

"Do you think you could stir up some unrest?"

"Yeah, I think I could manage that."

The door closed quietly behind her. Lee grinned at himself in the mirror. He had been waiting for this moment for years. After Fred's death, George had tried, had really tried to move on with his life, to live without his twin. He had made an effort, but it hadn't been pretty; he had killed himself within a year. Lee had boarded up the windows of their shop and gone back to his life, but he had never let a day go by without remembering his two best friends. He would make them proud now. He would throw the wizarding world into a level of chaos that they had only dreamed of. Lee dried his hands and returned to his table. He sat through the rest of dinner, nodding and laughing at the appropriate times, but he was barely listening. In his head, he was already composing his first article.

o

o

Severus sat in his lab grading essays. The prophecy was gnawing at him. He had tried to bring it up with Hermione several times, but she had dismissed it. If Potter was still alive, that would change everything. The label had clearly read _H.J. Potter, 2008_. The prophecy had inarguably been made after Potter's supposed death. He had seen the body, had been sure that Potter was dead, but maybe it had all been a clever deception. The Dark Lord had never truly died…could Potter have done the same?

But if Potter was alive, Hermione would surely know about it. He couldn't imagine it being any other way. He suspected she had things that she hadn't told him. He still hadn't gotten a straight answer about the scar on her forearm. He had assumed she held small secrets. Would she have kept something that big from him? He wanted to say no. He wanted to say that she trusted him completely, that she wasn't Dumbledore, that she told him everything important…but there was a small doubt gnawing at him, a small voice inside his head whispering 'what if?"

He had been a pawn to Dumbledore, a tool. Why did the fact that she was sleeping with him make him think that this was different? He was a wizard, a man, a slytherin, a death eater; he should have known better.

It was his fault, really. He had offered it to her, _whatever_ _was left of his broken soul_. He had not thought to ask for anything in return. Voldemort had demanded it from him, Albus had manipulated it out of his grasp using his own guilt, but she had not even lifted a finger. He had given it to her freely. If anyone was to blame, it was himself.

His thoughts were interrupted by her entrance into the room.

"You were meeting with the house elves?" He asked, pushing both his thoughts and his work aside.

"Yes," she sighed, settling herself down into one of the chairs, "They're still divided. Dobby has been able to convert quite a lot to our side, but the majority is still loyal to the old ways. He's making progress, but not enough."

"And what of the other alliances?"

"I meet with the centaurs this evening. They are ready to deal."

"Good."

"I'm going to go have something to eat and a shower before I go to meet with the centaurs. I would like to have you there, if you don't mind."

"Of course not."

She headed towards the door, but stopped short of it, turning to face him, lips parted slightly.

It looked for a moment as if she was going to say something, but instead she turned again and walked out the door. He had the feeling that something important had almost happened.

o

o

The centaurs were arguing when they reached the clearing.

"We shouldn't involve ourselves in the affairs of humans."

"We stayed out of it before and look where it got us? We are involved whether we like it or not, we might as well have some influence in the outcome."

They were gathered around a table-height stump that contained a parchment and a quill. The two centaurs looked up at the approaching wizards. Hermione nodded respectfully in greeting to the leader.

"Bane."

"Silence," he said, in response to the whispered protest of the centaur to his side.

"We have created this treaty," he motioned to the parchment, "to pledge our support to you in this war." She picked it up and read through it, her eyes darting back and forth across the page. Bane waited patiently as she read. This was a girl who was ruthless enough at sixteen to lead a woman into the forbidden forest, into the path of the centaurs who were out for her blood. The centaur would not underestimate her.

Finally, she set down the parchment.

"These terms are acceptable. Everything is in order. We are grateful for your support. All that is left to do is sign the treaty."

The centaur stamped his hoof in ink and imprinted his mark on the parchment. The black ink sparkled and glowed gold for a moment as the magic sealed the deal. He looked expectantly at Hermione.

She took the quill and signed _Hermione Jane Granger_ in flowing script on the parchment and set the quill down on the table. It remained inky black. The magic did not take.

The centaur eyed her carefully. The stars had told him, but still he had not believed.

"In order to be magically binding, it has to be your _true_ name."

She hesitated for a moment and then picked up the quill again. Her hand trembled slightly.

And then she signed. She signed the name she had to sign, the name she never signed unless it was absolutely necessary, unless her true name was needed for it to be legally and magically binding.

_Hermione Jane Potter._

Severus' eyes flickered down and then lingered on the parchment. She could feel his gaze on her, but didn't turn to look at him. She had meant to tell him. She had believed that one day she would wake up with the words to tell him what had happened, but that day had never come. She had lost track of how many times she had opened her mouth to tell him everything. The words had just never come out.

She had told herself that it wasn't important in the grand scheme of things, that he didn't have to know. But she knew that was a lie, a simple untruth to convince herself that what she was doing was the right thing. It wasn't important, not really, but she had known that it would be important to him, that he would take her silence as nothing less than betrayal.

She left the clearing without looking back. He stood, staring at the signature, unable to move.

She arrived in the apparition chamber with a crack. She opened the door to leave, letting the silver moonlight stream in to the small, dark room. But she hesitated. The conversation would happen sooner or later. She stood in the doorway for several minutes with her back to the interior of the room until she heard a soft pop behind her. She did not turn around. A few crickets chirped outside, but other than that the night was silent and still. She could hear him breathing in the room behind her. Her right hand held the door frame, fingernails digging into the soft wood. He said nothing. She couldn't see him to tell if he was trying to get his anger under control or if he was merely trying to find the words. Finally he spoke, breaking the silence of the night with his slow, careful words.

"Hermione," he said softly, "you haven't told me everything, have you?"

"No, I haven't."

"Why did you say no when I asked you to marry me?"

Because the Dark Lord had slit Harry's throat, because she had watched the blood slowly seep out and run down his chest, the same blood he had signed his name with less than a week before. Because everything with Severus had been the exact opposite of what it had been with Harry. Because the thought of seeing his blood made her sick, because she couldn't picture his blood on the contract without picturing his blood seeping out of his flesh.

"It's not…it's not like that. It's not what you think," she said quietly, refusing to look at him.

"You're _married_ to _him_?" He snarled in disgust. Another woman that he thought was his, but was Potter's. Was she still in love with him? The question was too painful to even ask.

"Was," she whispered, correcting him. "I _was_ married to him."

How could he compete against a dead hero, mourned and idealized? If he had been no competition against a living James, how could be compete with a dead Harry…if Harry really was dead. If not, he was in love with another man's wife…again. If so, what had he been to her for the past year and a half?

"Where's the ring, _Mrs. Potter_," he sneered.

"In a drawer in my office?"

"Carefully filed, no doubt. Alphabetically? Is that how you keep all your husbands straight? Do lovers have a separate file?"

"That's not fair, Severus." It wasn't and he knew it, but who was she to talk about fair?

"You said…you said you had never been with a wizard…" He managed to choke out. For some reason that lie stung more than all the others. Had it all been a lie from the beginning?

"I hadn't. The marriage…it wasn't like that."

"Then what was it like?" She could handle the anger in his voice, but not the hurt.

"I will tell you. I will tell you everything…after tomorrow. There's someone who has even more of a stake in this than you do. There's someone else who deserves to hear it first."

He knew what they had planned for tomorrow and nodded slowly. He was not the only one who had been betrayed. He could wait another day.

"Tomorrow."

She relaxed and stepped out the door of the chamber, sitting down on the concrete steps that lifted it from the ground. He sat down beside her and looked across the moonlit garden as he spoke.

"I wondered about the orphanage, about how they let you take Dahlia so easily. It had already been arranged, hadn't it? You had legal rights to her, didn't you?"

"Yes." Her father's cousin by marriage. Not a close relation, but the only one the girl had. Harry Potter had left her more than just gold.

And then the pieces clicked into place, the picture he should have seen before but somehow missed. Everything slowly came into focus.

"The prophecy…_H.J. Potter_…Harry Potter isn't alive. The prophecy was about _you_."

"Yes." In a different situation, he would have laughed at the irony: A prophecy about the woman who did not believe in prophecies. He now understood the fervor with which she had destroyed it, how much it had scared her. It would have terrified her to think that her actions were not her own decisions, that there were things which were beyond her control.


	14. The Prisoner of Azkaban

14: The Prisoner of Azkaban

The fog was thick and dense, a noxious chemical haze. Although it floated in the air, it seemed heavy. Mist was nothing new for this place. The sea, the sky, the stones, were all grey. In the fog they were barely discernable from each other. But this wasn't the normal fog. This was thicker, if such a thing were even possible.

Through the haze, dark silhouettes of figures staggered over the rocks.

What kind of magic was this, one might ask. But this wasn't magic; this was science. They had created it through months of preparation. Hermione explained it as a pesticide for dementors. It was a chemical endorphin spray of their own design. No wizard could get close enough to deliver it without losing their soul. Severus' wand twitched in his hand as he controlled the army of inferi who carried tanks of the gas, letting it loose into the atmosphere. Hermione stood beside him, in front of a group of eight wizards they had brought with them, her eyes glued to a digital screen measuring the levels of the gas in the air. There was really nothing like a good combination of dark magic and muggle science. Little by little, the dementors were driven higher and higher into the atmosphere.

One would have thought that the island would seem different once the dementors had gone, but it did not. It had been a desolate place long before the dementors had arrived and would continue to be so long after they had gone. The place had created the creatures, not the other way around.

The storm clouds rolled fiercely over the jagged cliffs. Severus stood beside Hermione as they waited for the prisoners who from where they stood were nothing but tiny dots against the vast landscape. Even from that distance, he caught sight of a head of red hair whipping in the wind. The hair seemed impossibly, almost obscenely red against the bleak landscape. He had no doubt as to the owner.

As the second war had ended, muggleborns who didn't disappear were killed, halfbloods were treated as a lower class, the scum of the soles of the pureblood's expensive boots. But the blood-traitors had been a more difficult issue. The new regime had been created on the premise of pureblood supremacy. To start it off by killing those it had fought to protect would have been asking for revolt.

But that wasn't the whole story; there had been more to it than that, much more. Even then, no one would have batted an eyelash if that one pureblood, the worst blood-traitor of them all had been silently disposed of. Everyone could have conveniently forgotten that she was a pureblood, could have looked the other way. But instead, she was hidden away, buried deep inside Azkaban, but kept alive…on his orders.

Tom simply hadn't been willing to let Ginerva die.

At the end of the First War when the Dark Lord had vanished, there were those like Lucius Malfoy who had claimed to have only become a death eater under the imperious. Then there was Bellatrix Lestrange who had never renounced him, never betrayed her beliefs, not even once. The end of the second war had been no different.

Seamus Finnigan had renounced his previous affiliation with Dumbledore's Army after Potter had been killed. He claimed that Potter had held him under the imperious curse himself. Severus didn't hold it against him though. Hadn't he done the same thing himself? After all, how could you be a traitor when there was nothing left to betray? It had worked out well for Seamus. He had worked his way into a high-level job in the ministry. And he hadn't been the only one. Padma Patil, Lavender Brown, Ernie Macmillan, the list went on. All you had to do was prove your parents were purebloods and claim that Harry Potter had tricked you and you were free to go. Not everyone had been so cooperative.

Ginvera Weasley, the last remaining member of her family, had refused to renounce her beliefs. The Dark Lord had remembered her, had wanted her to join him. She was a pureblood after all. What a slap in the face it would have been to all who opposed him for Voldemort to have the former fiancé of Harry Potter by his side. He would have let her be his queen. All she had to say was that Potter had tricked her, had forced her, that she had only affiliated herself with the Order only because of her Muggle-loving family. He would have let her go in a second even though he knew it wasn't true. All she had to do was say the words. But instead she had spit in his face and called him a murderer.

As the woman approached, Hermione stepped forward to embrace her. The two women stood there for some time, holding one another tightly. There were no words between them; their shared loss was beyond anything that could be spoken. Each could only imagine what the other had been through. The last time they had seen each other, they had been barely more than girls.

Severus watched Ginerva Weasley. Her red hair seemed even brighter against her pale skin. She had been attractive as a girl, all the boys at Hogwarts had thought so. She was still beautiful, but in a different way. Her torn dress hung loose over her skeleton-thin frame. It was a sort of tattered beauty, like a gold coin that has been rusted and dented. It had been the same way with Bellatrix. Ginerva looked up at him and he recognized the mad glint in her eye; he had seen it in Bella's.

"Professor," she greeted him, stepping away from Hermione, "Rumor in Azkaban is that you're dead," she said with a mad grin.

"That seems to be the rumor a lot of places, Miss Weasely."

He motioned for her to step off to the side with him and she followed. He lowered his voice as he inclined his head towards the prisoners that had followed her.

"Can we trust them? All of them?"

She surveyed the tattered bunch of prisoners. "They're all our people. Some of them have only a shred of sanity left, but they know what side they're on if that's what you're asking. They listen to me and I would trust any one of them with my life." He nodded.

The group apparated back to the school, each taking one of the escaped prisoners with them. The group of prisoners was sent to the infirmary to be taken care of, but Ginny was brought to the Headmistress' own quarters. She took a nice long bath, the one that she had been fantasizing about for years. The warm soothing water washed away the grime of the place, and maybe even some of the despair.

After she had been cleaned, she changed into a spare set of robes that Hermione had lent her. There was a copy of the Daily Prophet lying on the bed and she glanced down at the headline, '_Dark Lord Fails to Deliver Promised Vision_.' She grinned.

Ginny opened the door that led out of Hermione's bedroom and into her sitting room. As the door opened, she caught a glimpse of her former potions professor standing in front of the fire close…too close…to her friend as they both exchanged low words. She could recognize the comfortable distance between lovers when she saw it. As the sound of the opening door, they both stepped away from each other.

"Miss Weasley," the man said, quickly excusing himself from the room.

"Hermione Granger!" Ginny hissed as soon as the door closed behind him.

Hermione looked away. Ginny's high pitched hiss melted into a low chuckle.

"And everyone always says that_ I_ have dangerous taste in men."

"Ginny, I…" she started to explain but was interrupted as the door opened again and Severus came back in followed by a young girl. The girl carried a tray of food which she set down on the table.

"Thank you, Dahlia," Hermione said, placing her hand on the girl's shoulder.

"You have a daughter?" Ginny asked in surprise, her eyes widening at Hermione before darting quickly to Severus. She hadn't expected this.

"After all the Cruciatus, I wouldn't have though that either of you would have been able to…"

"This is Dahlia Dursley," Hermione said quickly, not wanting to make the situation more awkward than it already was.

She could tell by the stunned look on Ginny's face that the woman remembered the name 'Dursley' and could put things together.

"Dahlia, This is your Aunt Ginny."

The girl looked curiously at Hermione.

"You have a sister?"

"No, not really," Hermione replied, "just a really good friend."

Ginny smiled at Hermione and then at the girl.

"It's nice to meet you, Dahlia."

Ginny had had six brother, but no sisters. Hermione had been the closest thing she had ever had to a sister. Although Hermione had come to the Burrow when they were younger because she was Ron's friend, she had always stayed in Ginny's room. Hermione had always cast a silencing spell on the room so that the girls could stay up talking late into the night. Never, on any of those starry summer nights, lying on their cots as the soft moonlight shone in the windows, would she ever have imagined that the girl on the bed next to her would one day break her out of Azkaban.

She had secretly wished that Hermione would one day marry her brother so that they could be sisters for real. She could now see what a selfish delusion that had been. Ginny had thought that she could marry Harry and Hermione could marry Ron and they could live next door to each other and raise their kids together and everyone could live happily-ever-after. Things had obviously not turned out that way. She absent-mindedly twisted the diamond ring which sat alone on her finger, which had sat alone for nearly twelve years.

Ginny sat down and began to eat the food that the girl had brought. She watched Snape shoot Hermione a cold look from across the room. The tension in the room was palpable. As confident as she was in her first assessment that the two were lovers, she could also sense that something was amiss between them, that something had happened.

The door opened and Duncan popped his head in.

"Headmistress, she's here."

"Send her in."

Ginny looked up as Luna Lovegood entered the room and smiled at her.

"It's nice to see you, Ginny."

"It's nice to see you too, Luna."

"How was Azkaban?"

Ginny shrugged.

"And the nargles?"

Hermione was about to laugh when she noticed the look of fear on Ginny's face.

"Azkaban is infested with them," she said quietly, then rubbed her arm as if she was trying to brush something off of her, scratching at her own skin. Had the insanity of Azkaban brought Ginny into Luna's reality? Hermione wondered how unstable Ginny truly was. The idea of telling Ginny the things she had to tell her if the woman was unbalanced made her dread it even more.

Luna reached into the bag that she had brought with her and pulled out a slender wooden box. She opened it and pulled out a wand, handing it to Ginny.

"A business associate of mine buys and sells used wands. A few years ago, he walked into my shop with this one. I recognized it and bought it to save for you."

The woman caressed the piece of wood that she had known so well and been separated from for so many years. She waved it but it simply lay lifeless in her hand. She tried again and still nothing. Ginny looked up at Luna with a sort of panic in her eyes.

"My wand, why won't my wand work?"

"The wand chooses the wizard. As a wizard changes, the wand changed with him. In your case, I think that Azkaban has made you unrecognizable to your own wand. You have changed without it."

Luna slowly pulled the wand out of Ginny's motionless hand.

"I have others you can try. We'll find one that works for you." She laid the contents of her bag out on the table. After several tries, they found one that worked.

Luna packed up the other wands.

"Luna, get what's left of the DA back together," Hermione told her. Luna nodded.

"Severus will escort you out."

Luna hugged both of them and steeped out the door. Severus turned back and gave Hermione a long look before shutting the door behind him. He knew what she had to do.

The door swung softly shut, leaving Hermione and Ginny alone in the room. Ginny stared at Hermione as if requesting an explaination.

"I know he's not your favorite person, but…"

"Hermione, I'm not Harry and I'm not Ron. You weren't there that last year…at Hogwarts. I know thing were bad for you and Harry, but things were bad at Hogwarts too. He stood between us and the Carrows. I don't think I fully understood at the time, maybe it took years in Azkaban going over the events again and again in my head. He's the reason I'm still alive."

A moment of silence settled between them. Ginny sighed and leaned back in her chair, giving the other woman a tired smile.

"It's really good to see you Hermione." She was the closest thing to family that she had left.

Hermione did not return the smile. Instead, she bit her lip nervously.

"There's something I need to tell you, Ginny. There's something you should know." The conversation she had been dreading for so many years. She walked to the other side of her office and opened a drawer.

o

o

_A/N: Thank you for all the reviews. I didn't mean to string you along for so long with the Weasley thing, but I moved the chapters around and this one ended up coming much later in the story than I had originally intended. Thanks for sticking with me. Belated bonus points to: ktaggart, Miss-Fleur-Riddle, JunoMagic, and Roxxi05 for guessing that it was Ginny. Some of you that guessed Percy made me wish that I had kept him alive too. Somehow this ended up as a pretty heavily female post-voldemort-wins world.  
_


	15. Two Golden Rings

15: Two Golden Rings

Hermione rummaged through the drawer and pulled out a small object. She crossed the room and handed Ginny the ring.

"It's yours. It was always yours."

Ginny examined the golden wedding ring in her hand, placing it on her finger next to the engagement ring that had sat alone for twelve years.

"How did you end up with this?" Ginny asked in amazement, staring at the ring. "Did Harry have it with him when he died?"

"No, Ginny," Hermione said slowly, gathering the nerve to continue. "I didn't take it…he gave it to me."

Ginny looked up at her, face devoid of emotion.

"You…" It was barely more than a whisper, as if her entire world had shattered.

"It didn't mean anything," Hermione said quickly, "We made sure it was kept sealed even within the ministry. It was a way for everything he had to be transferred to me on his death in a way that could not be contested and could not be discovered. Voldemort would have been able to find the records, had he ever looked. But you had his engagement ring, why would anyone ever look to see if Harry Potter had gotten married? The goblins at Gringotts who transferred the gold were the only ones who ever knew. We never…" she trailed off. Never consummated it. It was hurried, last minute; he had died within the week. At eighteen, she had become a virgin widow, left alone to mourn the death of a husband no one had even known she'd had.

_Twelve years earlier…_

"Hermione," he had asked her one night as they both sat in the dark tent together hungry and tired, "do you have a plan?"

"A plan?" she whispered back in the darkness, "a plan for what?"

"In case I die, in case he kills me. Do you have a plan?"

She was silent. How do you tell your best friend that you've come up with a plan for if he dies. She was thankful for the darkness as they sat there in silence. She knew she wouldn't be able to bear to look at him.

"Hermione," he said again softly, "if he kills me, things are going to get bad, worse than now. Those that are still hanging on to hope will only be able to fight for so long. As a muggleborn, as my best friend…"

"I have one," she interrupted him. "I have a plan." This was obviously something that had been bothering him for a while. She hoped that admitting to a plan would be enough.

"What is it?"

"Harry, I don't want to talk about this. It won't come to that. You will succeed."

"Hermione, what is it?"

"Harry, this is silly. As long as there's enough of the Order left, I'm going to keep fighting."

"And what if there isn't?"

He knew her too well; he wouldn't let her get away with avoiding the question. He knew that she would have a plan for every eventuality.

"If it really comes to that, I'm going to disappear into the muggle world, find other muggle-borns and train them," she whispered into the darkness.

"Start a school?"

"Something like that."

"How?"

"I can find them through genealogies, school records. I suppose I'll purchase a building and buy textbooks."

"How will you afford it?"

"When my parents died, they left me some money. It's not much, but it'll be a start. I'll figure something out."

They sat there for a few minutes in the darkness, listening to each other breathe.

"_lumos_," he whispered, and she saw his face in the blue light of his wand. His eyes held an unreadable expression. It was not that he was hiding his emotions, he had never been good at that. It was that his eyes held such a complex tangle of feelings that she could not decipher it. He dug around in his pockets for a few minutes before pulling out a small gold ring.

"It was my mother's," he offered in the way of an explanation, "I was going to give it to Ginny." It was cold in the tent and she could see his breath as he spoke, blowing eerie clouds in the soft blue wandlight.

He reached for her hand, but she quickly pulled it out of his reach.

"Harry, I think the engagement ring and the wedding ring are supposed to go to the same person. You can't…you can't have both a fiancée and a wife."

He reached into his robes and pulled out a piece of parchment.

"Last summer, I went to Gringotts to get the rings out of my parents' vault. I had a long talk with the goblins while I was there. Most times, records of inheritance are not released to the ministry. If there is a question, or any small contestation, the ministry gets involved, but if there is a blood relative or a marriage, Gringotts directly transfers the gold and keeps the records sealed from the ministry. The marriage doesn't even have to be sanctified by the ministry," he motioned to the parchment he held, "signing this will be all they need."

"Harry, this is ridiculous. I can't do this to Ginny. _You_ can't do this to Ginny." There was no mention of Ron. He had left.

"Hermione, I'm in love with Ginny and if I live through this, you and I will get a divorce and I'll marry her and we'll have kids and grow old together and no one will _ever_ know that you and I were married. I want Ginny to be my wife, but if I don't live, I want you to be my widow."

"Harry," she pleaded with him in the darkness.

"I know it's a lot to ask and I'm sorry I have to ask it of you, but I want the money to go to good use after my death."

"Harry, I don't want it. I don't want your money."

"It's not just money," he said quietly.

"What?"

"My parents had some other properties. Grimmauld Place is of course included, but the Blacks had several other houses as well. And the library of Grimmauld Place has been emptied into one of the vaults. There are rare spellbooks in there, they could help you."

"Ginny will…"

"Ginny will understand. She has my heart and my soul, I want you to have everything else."

He set his still-lit wand down between them pulled out a knife, using it to cut open his arm and signing the contract with his own blood.

He reached over and took Hermione's trembling hand in his and slipped the golden ring onto her finger.

It was loose.

"Hermione, I wouldn't ask this of anyone else." With her hand still securely in his grasp, he picked up the knife once more and sliced her arm open. Tears ran down her cheeks and onto the parchment, smearing the blood as she shakily signed her name. He picked up his wand and touched it to her ring. The gold glinted for an instant before it became invisible.

Hermione had never been a girl who had elaborate fantasies about her wedding, but she had always imagined it to be with a man she planned to spend her life with, not a man was already looking at his own end. She had imagined her parents to be there, or at least someone to witness it. And she had imagined a wedding night, a real wedding night, with a man who wasn't in love with another woman. They didn't even kiss. After he had sealed the cut he had made on her arm, he held her as she cried herself to sleep. It was the only night they ever shared a bed. He was dead by the end of the week.

Looking back at it, she wondered if he had seen his own end coming. He had never spoken of his death before that night. She wondered if he had known more than he had told her.

She had gone to Gringotts the night he died, had made arrangements for everything to be quietly transferred to a muggle bank in Switzerland. She had taken off the ring as soon as she returned home, it had never fit her anyways.

She finished her story and stared across the room at Ginny. It had been Harry's idea, and just like always she was the one left to clean up the mess.

"I wanted to tell you, but the Order was scattered and I didn't know how to contact you. They found you before I did and I didn't dare venture to Azkaban to give you the news."

Ginny fingered the ring she had just minutes ago placed on her own hand. She had wanted this ring for so long, but she had wanted to receive it from _him_ and she had wanted to be the first and only woman that he gave it to. But then again...she had also wanted him to be alive. No betrayal, no lie could ever compare to the pain of his death.

"It's yours, if you wanted to keep it…."

"No," Hermione said quickly, "I never wanted it."

Ginny looked down at the ring and then back up at Hermione.

"Does Snape know?"

"He knows, but not the details." She sighed, "How could I tell him when you didn't even know?"

Ginny nodded.

"He wants me to marry him. I told him no. How could I when another man's wedding ring still sat in my drawer? How could I when I hadn't even told him what my last name was?"

She stared down at the scar on her forearm.

"How could I marry him when the last man I married was dead within the week? How could I sign my blood to another contract without seeing Harry's blood running into a puddle on the ground?"

Ginny stood and headed towards the door. "I just...I just need to leave. I need to be alone for a while."

She watched the red-headed woman leave, feeling as though she carried a giant weight out the door with her. The ring had been bearing down on her since she had accepted it. At first there had been the guilt both from the knowledge that she had a ring and a husband that should have belonged to someone else and the guilt from letting her best friend know that she had made plans contingent on his failure, contingent on his death. Then after he had died, the ring had continued to bear down on her, reminding her of her secret, his death, and her responsibility. As his heir, she felt that in addition to his inheritance she had also been passed down his duty to the wizarding world. Her inheritance had come at a price.

But she couldn't blame him. It was the secret marriage that had made the school possible, that had made everything possible. Without the fortunes of the Potters and the Blacks, it all would have been much harder, if not impossible.

Hermione took a deep breath and gathered her nerve. She had looked the Dark Lord in the face, she had thrown the pieces of her broken wand at Lucius Malfoy, but the thought of confronting her lover filled her with dread. He had stood by her side today in public and done his duty, but it was obvious that privately he had not forgiven her.

She made her way down the stairs and opened the door to his office. He was not as his desk but instead sat in a chair staring into the fire, a half-empty glass of firewhisky in his hand. He didn't look up as she entered. She closed the door softly behind her and leaned back against it.

"I don't love him."

The twitch of his hand on his glass was the only indication that he had heard her or was even aware of her presence in the room. He continued to stare into the fire.

"I never loved him, not like that."

"You married him," he accused calmly.

"For money, for property, for books...not for love. I didn't...we didn't...we never even consummated the marriage."

He continued to stare into the fire for a few moments before responding.

"I know."

She eyed him curiously.

"How do you know?"

"It would have healed the cut on your arm."

"Oh." Of course.

"You told Miss Weasley?"

"Yes."

"How did she take the news?"

"She took it...better than I expected."

"There's more to her than she lets on."

"What do you mean?"

He looked at Hermione for a moment and then back into the fire, ignoring her question.

"Tell me," he demanded. "Tell me everything."

The words poured out of her, stilted at first and then more fluid. She told him the same story she had told Ginny, the story of that night so many years ago, that night that continued to haunt her. She could not think of the marriage without reliving his death and she could not think of his death without remembering the marriage. The vision of Harry's dark red blood and electric green eyes blurred and shifted in her dreams into Voldemort's snake-like red pupils the the violent green of the killing curse. She finished the story and waited for him to reply, to say anything. Several minutes went by before he spoke.

"You didn't tell me. You kept it from me, even after I asked you to marry me," he could hide his deepest secrets from the Dark Lord, but he could not keep the pain out of his voice as he spoke to her.

"I know. I should have told you, I just couldn't bring myself to do it." It was a weak excuse and she knew it, but it was the truth.

He did not respond.

"I gave Ginny the ring."

Still no response.

"Dammit Severus, look at me. I love you," she spoke in a whispered plea, hoping the words would make things better. They did not.

He stood and turned to face her, his eyes burning.

"Then marry me," he challenged, "Prove it."

"No." Calmly, firmly.

"No?" He snarled in disbelief, taking an aggressive step towards her.

"No," she repeated, meeting his eyes and standing her ground. "Ask me anything, but not that. Not until...not until this is over, not until Voldemort is dead. I can't...I can't be widowed again. I won't."

"I won't be used again, Hermione." He was yelling now. He threw the glass that was still in his hand and it shattered against the wall. "Voldemort used me, Dumbledore used me and now you. I won't be left in the dark and used only when I am needed." This wasn't just about the marriage she had kept secret anymore, it wasn't even about her and him...it was about all the people who ever had used him and given him nothing in return.

She didn't flinch.

"You came to _me_. You begged me for asylum, for a job, for a life. I never promised you anything."

"I never thought that I had to _ask_ you for anything in return. That's not who I thought you were."

"Well, I guess you were wrong," she said defiantly.

"You've lost track of yourself, Hermione. You were the girl who fought for the house-elves. You were the girl who always was there for her friends whenever they needed her, helping them with their homework and asking nothing in return. I didn't think I _had_ to ask you."

"I'm not that girl anymore, Severus. I've changed...I've _had_ to change."

"You've become _him_." _Dumbledore_, even the feel of the unspoken name on the tip of his tongue made his stomach roll.

"He was good at what he did, you can't deny that. I've kept the school hidden for nearly twelve years. I'm willing to do whatever I have to in order to keep them safe. Even if some have to be sacrificed, so many others are saved."

"You're playing with people's lives."

"It's..." She started and then caught herself, but she had already said too much.

"It's what?" He said sharply, "for the greater good? Please tell me you don't believe that crap?"

"I do." Her eyes blazed with conviction.

"You never used to."

"You didn't know me. You stand there trying to tell me who I was, but you didn't know me. You saw what you expected to see, what you still expect to see."

"What has this been to you, Hermione? What have I been to you? A convenient fuck and a willing servant?"

"How can you say that, Severus? We've shared a bed for nearly two years."

"And yet you never told me you were married."

And there they were again, talking themselves in circles.

"I don't know what to say."

"Don't you trust me?"

"Of course I trust you."

"Then why are you still keeping secrets from me?"

She looked down. She had no answer, so he answered for her.

"Because that's what _he _did. Because Albus Dumbledore kept his cards close to his chest, because Albus Dumbledore always guarded his secrets possessively. You've spent too many years trying to be him that you don't even know who you are anymore. You've spent too many years holding your secrets alone that you don't even know _how_ to trust anyone anymore."

"That's not true."

"I asked _nothing_ of you, Hermione. I made no demands because I didn't think I had to, but I'm making them now. I won't be used. I am your partner, your equal partner, or nothing at all." He was sick of it. He had lived most of his life in a spy, existing in the shades of gray. But he was done with that. He had chosen a side. Deep down he had always been an all-or-nothing sort of a man. He had been a man who believed in absolutes, forced to live a life of moral relativity.

The door slammed behind him, leaving her in the room alone to absorb the full impact of his words.

o

o

_A/N: Please Review! I tried to be more careful with this chapter (Yeah, I spelled Ginerva wrong in the last one, there's really no excuse for that one.) __Also, I know that Seamus is a half-blood, but for the purposes of this story, I really need him to be a pureblood, just a small tweak. __I'm actually not a huge Ginny fan in general (as you can tell from some of my other stories), but I do feel like she had the potential to be a lot cooler than she was portrayed in DH. It seems like a lot of Hermione stories are anti-Ginny, so I wanted to try something different.  
_


	16. The Finnegans

16: The Finnegans

Hermione approached a small cottage. The curtains were drawn, but the light from within could be seen peeking through the cracks. Smoke billowed from the chimney, suggesting the cozy scene within. It was a place of security in the moonless night. There was an ache in her heart for the Burrow. At the Burrow, there was always a warm smile and an exuberant hug waiting for her. She had no illusions as to the greeting she would receive here. Taking a deep breath, she drew her cloak tighter around herself and approached the door. There was a delay after her knock and then the door opened slightly. She was greeted by an older, wary looking Seamus Finnigan.

"Hello?" he asked cautiously, hand reaching into his pocket for his wand at the sight of the darkly cloaked figure on his doorstep.

"Seamus, it's me, can we speak inside?" the figure said quietly in a voice that sounded distantly familiar. He had not heard this voice in many years and took a few moments to identify the owner. His eyes searched the darkness beneath the hood for the face that would identify the visitor.

"Seamus," she said again, lowering her hood, "inside, now."

He recognized her immediately and opened the door wider so that she could slip inside. As soon as the door had closed behind her, he whispered, "Hermione?"

"Seamus, I need to speak with you." He nodded and led her down the hallway connecting the foyer to the living room. Hermione stopped in the doorway. It was the cozy scene she had imagined from the outside. Two little boys played wizard's chess on the floor in front of the fireplace while a small girl played with her doll on the sofa. The room showed all the signs of family life. Her attention was focused on the woman with her back to the doorway, picking up an infant. The tattered apron gave Hermione a pang of loss for Molly Weasely.

"Seamus, who was at the door?"

The woman got the infant settled in her arms and turned around, her warm smile turning to stone as soon as she saw who was inside her house.

Lavender's eyes narrowed as she stared coldly at Hermione. Hermione held her glare without looking away. These women had never liked each other. Time had done nothing to change that. It didn't matter that Ron Weasely was dead or that Lavender had fallen in love again and now had a family of her own. There was an enmity there that ran deep and long.

"Lavender, dear, why don't you take the children up to bed? Hermione and I need to talk."

Hermione watched the range of emotions flash over the face of the other woman. She imagined this was how Narcissa Malfoy must have felt when her husband's old master had returned from the dead: a moment of excitement before the heart-wrenching fear for her family.

Lavender gave her husband a very Molly Weasley-like scowl, but complied.

"Nicolas, Roger, it's bedtime. You too, Sarah." The children complained but followed her obediently up the stairs, leaving her husband alone in the living room with the unwanted visitor.

Lavender tucked her children in upstairs as her mind raced. This woman, this woman always ruined everything. She was supposed to have left their world for good. She wasn't sure what Hermione wanted this time, but even her presence in their home was putting the entire family in danger.

Lavender walked softly down the stairs, hearing the tail end of the conversation between her husband and the woman.

"I need someone inside the ministry, with clearance at the highest levels," Hermione said to him in a low voice.

"I'll give you whatever support you need," Seamus replied sincerely.

Lavender stepped back into the room. Hermione looked up at her and stood.

"I should be going."

Seamus nodded, eager to not anger his wife any more than he already had.

"I'll see her out, dear," Lavender said softly and forcefully, escorting the woman down the hallway towards the front door while her husband remained in the living room. Once they had reached the door, she did not open it to let her guest out, but instead stopped and turned to face the woman.

"Leave my family alone."

"I wish I could, but I can't. You know I can't."

"I've worked so hard for this. I'm spent twelve years putting all this together and now you come here and rip everything apart. All I want is to live with my family in peace."

They were the words Narcissa would have said to the Dark Lord had she not been positive she would have been killed on the spot.

"Do you really want your children to grow up in a world like this?"

"I just want them to grow up," Lavender whispered softly.

_For the greater good_, Hermione said to herself, but the words did not make her feel any better. They would offer Lavender little comfort in comparison to the lives of her loved ones.

"Do you know what it's like to watch your children play, unaware of what's waiting for them, of the danger out there? Do you know what that's like?" Lavender asked, assuming that Hermione didn't.

"Yes. I know exactly what that's like," she said, thinking of Dahlia.

Hermione exited the house but did not disapparate immediately. Instead she stood behind the hedge and watched the light pour out of the small cottage into the dark night. If Ron had lived, would it have been the two of them with their many children in a cozy cottage on a dark night? Could she have been that woman? Or had she been wrong all along? Would Lavender have always made a better partner for Ron? Would she have been able to give him this….this life that he had always wanted?

Hermione had a family, but it was far from this idyllic picture that she was sure Ron had carried in his head of what a family should be. She had put together her own family, had made it from scratch. She had a partner who was not her husband and a daughter who was not her child. There were more conventional ways she could have done it, but she was Hermione Granger and she never took the easy way out.

But what had she done to that fragile family she had built?

She loved him, she really did, but he wanted proof of that love, demanded it. He had been used too many times to simply take her word for it. It was all or nothing, he had been perfectly clear about that. And as much as the thought of marrying him scared her, the thought of losing him was worse.

He was right. She had guarded her secrets greedily, possessively. She had let him in, but only so far. She had gotten so used to being alone that she had not stopped to think of the benefits that sharing her burden might have.

She made up her mind and disapparated.

Not much later, she entered his office. He sat at his desk grading papers and did not look up.

She approached and let the large stack of papers she was carrying fall on the desk in front of him with a loud thud. He looked up from his grading at her, the top of his head barely visible from where she stood over the tall stack of parchment.

"What is all this?" he asked in a scathing tone.

"This is everything, Severus. All my spies, all my contacts, everything. Anything I might not have told you, anything you might not know is in here. Read it at your leisure."

He stood up and stared at her evenly.

"I want …I _need_ you to be my partner in this. I can't do it alone."

He stared at her silently for a few moments.

"Your _full_ partner?" he asked finally.

"My full partner, my husband," she replied, pulling out a small knife and a piece of parchment from the folds of her robes.

"Are you sure?" he asked tentatively, as if not fully trusting the offer.

In response, she drew the knife over her arm, splitting the skin apart at the scar. She picked up a quill from his desk and used her blood to sign the marriage contract.

She held out the knife to him, blood still dripping down her arm. Her heart beat rapidly in her chest. Was it too late? After learning the secrets that she kept from him, was this not what he wanted anymore?

Her fears were assuaged as he reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out the ring that he had offered her so many months ago. He quietly slipped it onto her finger and took the knife from her hand, repeating the procedure on himself. There was none of the quiet desperation that had accompanied this ritual when Harry had done it, only a steadfast determination. She inhaled suddenly as he sliced through his forearm, through the black mark that marred his skin. As he signed, the blood ran red over the black of the mark. She had a flash of Harry's blood, of Harry's death, but pushed it out of her mind. History would not repeat, she told herself. She would make sure of that. This one would live.

He took her hand and led her into his bedroom.

Since the moment he had stepped into her school, into her world, everything had been on her terms. It had been a fundamentally unequal relationship from the start.

He had spent his nights in _her_ rooms, in _her_ bed. They had never made love in his bed. He led her there now. He had transfigured an armchair to serve as a bed for the past several nights, since he had found out about her secret marriage. He would take her on his bed, to seal the marriage, to establish that they were not playing just by _her_ rules anymore.

He laid her down on the narrow bed and undressed her. The blood still dripped from the narrow cut on her arm that he had not bothered to heal. She was lightheaded from the loss of blood, from the sight of that blood, from the memories it evoked, from the meaning of what she had just done.

"I take it you never got this far in the process with Potter?" He asked as he undressed.

she shook her head. With Harry, there had been nothing but tears after she had signed, nothing but pain.

He thrust into her as his magic pulsed, coursing in and out of both of them. She reached up and wrapped her arm around him and the blood from her arm smeared onto his sweaty skin. The pain of the cut mixed and collided with the pleasure, arousing her in a way she had not expected.

She let herself go, let him control her, gave way to the rhythm of his demanding strokes, of his rough kisses. She had saved him, those years ago. She had given him an alternitive to a life of servitude to Voldemort; she had given him another chance. In exchange, he had given her himself. Now, she offered herself back to him freely, begging him to save her in return, to save her from herself.

She felt the magic course through her body and the skin on her arm tighten. They both reached their completion and he pulled out of her, lying down on the bed next to her and kissing her gently on the forehead. She studied her arm with a curious look in her eye. Where the cut on her arm had been, the skin had now healed over, healing not only the new cut from her marriage to Severus, but the old scar of her marriage to Harry. The skin on her forearm was now smooth, unmarked.

She no longer had Harry Potter's ring or mark or name.

She grasped Severus' arm and studied it, running her fingers over the skin. His cut had healed too. There was new, pale skin where the cut had been, a long streak of white through the dark mark.

o

o

They woke in the morning as the light came peeking in through the gaps in the dark curtains. It took Hermione a few moments to realize where she was. She had never before spent the night in his rooms. They were both awake, but made no move to rise.

"Did you see Ginny yesterday?" Hermione asked quietly.

"She was out walking in the garden most of the day." It made sense, he supposed, for a person who had spent the past twelve years locked in a dark room to never want to go indoors again.

Hermione sat up on the bed, pulling a blanket around the naked body.

"At moments, I can see what Azkaban has done to her, but at other moments, she seems….quite sane. I expected...I expected her to be worse."

He sat up on the edge of the bed next to her.

"Sirius Black was still functional after twelve years in that place," he commented in a detached way

"But he was an animagi. The dementors couldn't affect him while he was in his dog form. Ginny's not an animagi. The only way a prisoner would be able to protect their mind would be if they were an animagi...or maybe if they were highly skilled in occulmancy."

He stared at her, an amused expression on his face. He had assumed she had known. She caught his expression.

"No," she whispered, shaking her head. "It's not possible."

He smirked at her incredulity. There was finally something the know-it-all had not known. It had been right under her nose, but somehow that had been too close for her to see.

"How?"

It was a secret he had kept for nearly thirteen years, a secret that he had never felt had been his to tell. But if she was going to let him in completely, he owed this to her.

"There was an incident while I was headmaster. I discovered some things that Miss Weasley was keeping secret, things that may help us now."


	17. The Roles That Must Be Played

17: The Roles That Must Be Played

Severus stepped out of the dark building and into the dying light of the late afternoon sun. Across the garden, he saw a small figure sitting on the swing which hung from a tall oak tree. He made his way across the garden towards her.

It was the corner of the garden furthest from the building, a lonely forgotten corner full of brambles and overgrown bushes. It made sense that she would feel at home here. He approached and leaned against the tree.

The redheaded woman continued to swing and hum to herself as if oblivious to his presence. She was barefoot, her bare toes burying themselves in the soft grass as she swung gently back and forth. There were no shoes in sight.

"You spoke with Hermione?" she asked finally.

"Yes." He responded, "She told me the whole story."

The redhead continued to swing slowly, eyes focused on her dirty feet.

"I told her some things too," he said softly, "some things about you."

The swing stopped. She raised her head and met his eyes.

He had kept her secret for thirteen years.

o

o

o

_Thirteen years earlier…_

Failure. It had never been so close, so real.

It was looming, just out of sight, ready to bury him at any second. He could feel its presence. Sometimes he even thought he could see it out of the corner of his eye.

He stood at the window of the headmaster's office, his office, he reminded himself, and looked at the dark outlines that Hogwarts cast in the faint moonlight while he ran one hand through his long black hair.

He was holding the school together, but only by a thread. He was trying to maintain the delicate balance between brutality and humanity. He was walking a very fine line, trying to keep the children safe while still appearing to be a loyal death eater. Every move he made had to be carefully thought out, meticulously calculated as to not risk too little, as to not lose too much. He was exhausted.

He was the head of the school, probably the third Death Eater in the chain of command, and yet he had never felt more powerless.

He had killed Dumbledore, had given up his ties with the Order and for what? He had no idea if Potter was even any closer to completing the mission that Dumbledore had left for him.

And as for himself, he was failing in the task that was given to him. The sword, he had to get it to Potter. But where was Potter? There were thousands of wizards who would have loved to have known, but none more strongly than he.

He poured himself a glass of firewhisky and sat down behind the large headmaster's desk, _his_ desk, he reminded himself again. It made no difference that he was headmaster or that the previous headmaster was dead, he would only ever think of this office as Dumbledore's. And it was torture, pure exquisite torture that he had to spend every day in it, reminded every second of the man he had killed.

He was alone, bitterly alone. The old man had made sure of that, had made sure that he would be completely isolated with his secrets. In the playbook of Albus Dumbledore, the only way to keep a secret safe was to make sure that only one person knew and that that person was not in a position to share it with anyone.

There was a knock on the door of his office. He groaned to himself, but unlocked it with his wand, gulping down his drink in his other hand. The door swung open and three students were shoved into his dark torch-lit office. The Carrow siblings were behind them, holding the them at wandpoint.

"We found these students wandering in the halls," Amycus told him.

He studied the students. It was the usual suspects, Longbottom, Finnigan, Weasley, leaders of the rebellion against him. It was a rebellion he agreed with but desperately wished they would give up. Gryffindors. Those idiot children kept putting him in a terrible position, forcing him to punish them. Longbottom seemed to be in worse shape than the other two, his left arm twitching uncontrollably. The Cruciatus, of course. He seemed to have held up better than his parents...so far. Alecto held her wand to Longbottom's back while Amycus pointed his wand at Finnigan. His fingers were wrapped tightly around Weasley's upper arm. He yanked her to the ground, forcing her to her knees on the hard stone floor. The boys followed suit. Longbottom winced in pain.

"We have disciplined them, but thought to report their behavior to you in case you wished to punish them further."

He hid a shudder.

"Send them for detention with Hagrid tomorrow night. That should teach them a lesson."

He noticed a small smile on the edge of Longbottom's lip. They thought they knew something that he didn't.

His eyes scanned over the three students: bruises, cuts, scars. The school had become a battleground. And it was his fault, all his fault. He knew that this was the price he had to pay for a chance to win the war, but the stab of guilt made him want to vomit.

"Will there be anything else, Headmaster?"

His eyes shot up and he realized he had been staring at the students, lost in thought. He was losing it, he really was. If he didn't find Potter soon…

"No, just escort them back to their dormitory." He forced a sneer. "We wouldn't want them getting lost on the way."

The redhead was yanked to her feet and the boys followed.

He had to find Potter.

"I changed my mind," he heard himself say as Amycus opened the door and started to push Weasley out.

"Leave the girl."

Amycus turned his head towards Severus and raised an eyebrow. He opened his mouth to make a lewd remark but the scowl on the headmaster's face silenced him. Severus knew what was going through the Death Eater's head. The man was probably wondering whether Severus was going to torture her or use her for his own pleasure...or both. Longbottom, most likely thinking the same thing, struggled against the grasp of Alecto, who swiftly shoved him out the door. He shot his friend one last panicked look before he disappeared into the corridor. Her face, on the other hand, showed no fear.

Amycus thrust the girl back into the room and followed the other student out the door. Weasley stumbled but caught herself before she fell. She rubbed her arm where bruises were no doubt already forming from her rough treatment. She swiped her arm across her face, wiping up the blood from her cut lip onto the sleeve of her robes.

Severus stared at her. Why had he not thought of this sooner? He had been desperately trying to find out Potter's whereabouts for months so that he could bring Gryffindor's sword to him. So far, he had been unsuccessful. He was grasping at straws now, hoping that maybe Ginerva Weasley would have gotten some word of Potter's location either through her association with him or through her family. He was desperate, willing to try anything.

He approached her.

"Where is he, Miss Weasley, where's Potter?" He asked in a low, threatening voice.

She stared back at him defiantly.

"I don't know."

The silly girl, refusing him as if he could not just rip the information from her mind. She didn't even look away.

He grabbed her arm roughly, pulling her towards him, looking into her wide brown eyes and forcefully diving into her mind.

He was repelled with a force he had not expected, one so strong it was painful. It was as if he had dived from a tall cliff into the smooth blue surface of a lake only to find a concrete floor mere inches below the surface.

He was thrown back against the stone wall of his office, his head painfully slamming into the surface with a loud crack.

He pulled himself up, leaning on the bookcase for support. She stared at him coolly.

"Who taught you?" he asked, chest heaving and gulping for air. Dumbledore was the only one she would have had access to, but she had never spent any considerable time with the man. The only other Occlumens in Hogwarts was himself as he certainly hadn't taught her. He had taught Potter, but the boy hadn't learned enough from his lessons to protect his own mind let alone to teach it to another. There was no one else who could have taught her…unless…..

At the look of horror that flashed across his face, she nodded slightly.

"How was Tom supposed to get me to open the Chamber of Secrets if Dumbledore could just look into my eyes and know exactly what I was up to?" She said bitterly.

"But…but you were a first year." Even in his fifth year, Potter had seemed young for the training. Severus' head was still spinning from its collision with the wall.

"Yes, brilliant idea, isn't it? To teach a person how to control their feelings before they hit puberty, to teach them ways to manage their emotions and control their mind before it even becomes a problem, so when their hormones start acting up, when they experience betrayal, jealousy, love for the first time they already have the tools in place to deal with it."

He stared at her in wonder, as if he had never seen her before. To be honest, he hadn't. She held his gaze and took a step towards him.

"You don't need to pretend around me. You don't need to watch what you say. I am more than capable of protecting my secrets."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

She took another step closer to him and stared into his eyes, unafraid.

"I don't know why…or even how, but you're on our side."

"I killed Albus Dumbledore." Was this the first time he had said those words out loud?

"I know."

"How do you reconcile that with your naiive view of me as a hidden hero?"

"I don't, but I know what I've seen. I accept the contradiction. I accept that what I know, what I see is only a small piece of the overall picture. I've been watching you. You've been intervening, moderating our punishment, sending us to Hagrid. Things are bad here, but not as bad as they could be."

There was a mad glint in her eye. After the incidents of her first year, everyone had insisted that she was all right, that she had recovered completely. Severus had been skeptical.

She had been possessed by a dark wizard as a first year, how could she _possibly_ be all right? He had told Dumbledore that she needed therapy, serious therapy. Dumbledore had said she was fine and had sent her away with a mug of hot chocolate. The fool.

"Why aren't you with him? Why aren't you with Potter?"

"He left me. They left without me, never included me in their plans. They left me to wait for them in silence and fear."

"But you're not waiting in silence, are you?"

"No, I'm not. I'll fight for him even if he doesn't want me to."

Severus stared out the window.

"He took the wrong Weasley."

"What?"

"He would have been better off taking you with him and leaving your brother behind."

"Perhaps."

He turned to face her, studying her for a moment.

"But he doesn't know, does he?"

"Doesn't know what?"

"He doesn't know what you can do; he doesn't know how powerful you've become."

"No," she said sadly, "how can I tell him? If he can't protect his mind from Tom, how can I tell him the secret that would probably mean my life?" He could tell by the way she looked at him that he was the first person she had ever spoken to about this, the first person who she had trusted both to control their mind enough to keep her secrets and to not judge her for them.

She looked at him as if she were asking his forgiveness, as if after all of the terrible things he had done, that _she_ would ask forgiveness from _him_. Maybe it wasn't forgiveness then, maybe it was understanding. Maybe it was the need to know that someone else in her situation would have done the same thing; he would have.

"Occlumency wasn't all he taught you, was it?"

"No. He needed me to perform magic, magic far beyond what children that age would naturally have been capable of. He pushed me into things…far before I was ready for them." The damage that he had done was irreversible. She was no doubt very powerful, but the power she possessed was beyond her control. He had forced open her magic before she had the ability to be in command of it. Severus doubted the wizard had any idea of the damage he had done. He would have thought only of his immediate needs and not the debris left in his wake. If he had any idea of the power he had given her, she would not have been allowed to live.

There was something, something about her…a darkness, he now realized. Tom had forced her to perform dark magic, a taint she could never fully get rid of. It had become a part of her. Was that what had drawn her to Potter? The kindred darkness she saw in him? The tragedy of the situation was that for him she needed to remain pure and innocent. The one thing that could help her, to speak to him about the darkness she felt would consume her, was the one thing she could never let him know.

What struck Severus was not just her maturity, but also the depth of her understanding of the role that she needed to play. Potter needed one pure, unblemished thing in his life. He needed something to fight for. He needed to believe that if he survived this, he could have a normal life. She had understood this and had hidden her darkness from him, had hidden her power. She had pretended to be someone else and she had done it out of love for him. He believed she was the nice, innocent, girl-next-door. He had no idea.

But Potter wasn't the only powerful wizard with an interest in the girl…he glanced down at the mark on his arm. She seemed to interpret his gaze.

"_He_…he's protecting me, isn't he? Sometimes when one of the Carrows raises their wand at me, the other whispers 'it's _her_'. That means something, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"He doesn't want Pureblood blood spilled, but it's something more with me, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"What, exactly?"

"He's issued an order that no permanent damage is to be done to you and no Unforgivables."

She nodded and stared out the window, fidgeting with a finger as if a ring lay on it, but he could see no ring.

"He hasn't forgotten me," she whispered, as if she had hoped the wizard might have.

"No, he hasn't."

Severus didn't pretend to understand what feelings the Dark Lord had towards this girl. It wasn't love, of course, he wasn't capable of that, but it was something. Somehow the two most powerful wizards, the two wizards whose fate was intertwined and whose confrontation was sure to decide the future of the wizarding world, were both fascinated by this girl.

Potter loved her, there was no doubt about that. He wondered if maybe in the same ways that Potter could speak Parseltongue and experience Voldemort's thoughts, that maybe some of Potter had rubbed off on the Dark Lord as well. There was only one thing that was certain: both men underestimated her.

"I should get back to my room."

She turned and headed towards the door. Her hand was on the knob before he spoke. And when he did, it was rushed and muttered, little more than a whisper and yet she understood every word.

"There's a first year being held in the dungeons….The east side. The password is Acromantula." Her back was still towards him and she left without ever turning around, but in a few days he received word that there had been a mysterious security breach in the dungeons.

o

o

A month later…

A student's room, had he been in one of these since he was a student himself? He waited in the shadows watching her sleep. The other girls who shared the room had either not come back for the year or had disappeared by now. He needed to talk to her but could not bring himself to wake her. She looked so young as she slept, so innocent. He leaned against the wall, letting his head fall against it with a barely-audible thump, but that was all it took. He was surprised at how she went from completely asleep to wand out and ready in the blink of an eye.

"Who's there?" She said calmly and forcefully, as if she had not been asleep just an instant ago.

He stepped out of the shadows and into the streak of moonlight that glinted in through the leaded glass window so that she could see his face. She relaxed and lowered her wand.

"What is it?" she asked, knowing that he would not be there unless something had happened.

"He's not protecting you anymore…your family, Potter, you're too close to important targets to be left alone."

Her eyes darted from him to the window to the half-packed trunk and then back to him.

"You're going home for the Easter holidays?" He asked, gesturing towards the trunk.

"Yes."

He nodded. "Stay out of trouble tomorrow morning and when you get home, stay there..."

o

o

That was the last time he had seen the girl for thirteen years. He had heard stories, of course, about her stay in Azkaban, but had never ventured in to see for himself. The madness, the spark of raw magic, it had been there all along, Azkaban had only eroded away the surface that hid it so well.

She was nothing if not devoted. She would have given her life for Potter, would have fought by his side in an instant. He had probably known that. What he hadn't known, however, was that it would have helped him. He loved her, but to him she was an innocent, beautiful witch, to be locked away and kept far from danger.

It struck him that Lily might have had the same problem, to be loved and adored but never taken seriously. He had been shocked, devastated when he had heard of the events leading to the Dark Lord's defeat, but he had also been surprised. _Surprised_. Even Severus who had loved Lily and wanted to protect her had not known the full extent of her power until her death. Harry Potter had fallen into the same trap. Even the man who had loved her more than anything had died never knowing what Ginerva Weasley was capable of.

Hermione came out into the garden. Her robes were neatly pressed, immaculately clean. Her hair was pulled back. She was a stark contrast to the escaped prisoner who sat barefoot on the swing, long red hair dancing wildly in the breeze. One woman had power, the other had control.

Hermione had always been powerful, but never extraordinarily so. She was had achieved all that she had because she had harnessed every ounce of that power, leaving none to be wasted. She had never relied on natural talents, on instinctive, uncontrolled magic, as Harry had done, but had worked hard for every spell. Even as a small child, she had not had the uncontrolled outbursts of power that other children experienced. Even as a child, she had been in complete control of her abilities.

When she fought, she fought not with the raw power that Harry had, but with a lightening-quick extensive library of spells, both combat and non-combat. While Harry had held his magic like a large sword, powerful but too heavy to wield, clumsy in his hands, she held hers like a scalpel, quick, delicate, precise.

Ginerva, on the other hand, had been forced to accept power beyond her years, beyond her experience. While Hermione's brain spun with plans and schemes to seize power and create peace, while her mind ticked with spells and hexes, Ginerva's heart beat only with revenge. Hermione had been Harry Potter's successor as leader of the rebellion, but it had been Ginerva whose heart had been shattered by his death. Hermione fought for a better world, while Ginerva fought only for the death of one man.

Hermione was the mastermind, Ginny was a weapon.

Severus could feel the difference emanating from the two women. Hermione's magic wrapped around her, steady and strong, she was perfectly in control. Ginny's whipped and sparked unevenly, too powerful for her own good, powerful enough to destroy her if she let it.

Her mind had been protected in Azkaban, but how does one protect the heart?

Hermione's magic was clean, pure. She had wandered into morally ambiguous territory with some of the decisions she had been forced to make, but she had kept her magic clean. If she was to lead, she could not risk the temptation. Dumbledore had known that. She would need others who would do what she could not, who would scuff away the polished surface of their souls so that hers could remain untarnished. Ginny would do this for her.

Severus left the two women alone in the garden.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you...I couldn't."

"I know," Hermione replied softly. All the nights they had spent in Ginny's room in the Burrow, sharing secrets, when really they had each held far more. Those last nights they had spent there, Hermione had wanted nothing more than to blurt out everything about their upcoming plans to search for Horocruxes to Ginny. Someone should know what they were doing, after all, if something were to happen to the three of them. But Harry wanted Ginny safe and had made Hermione promise him that she would tell Ginny nothing of their mission. The less Ginny knew, the safer she would be. And so Hermione had kept her mouth shut out of loyalty to Harry.

Those same nights, Ginny had wanted to tell Hermione what had really happened all those years ago with Tom. She had kept it a secret for five years but it seemed essential now. What if her powers could help them in some way? But she knew that she had to keep the secret from Harry at all costs and he and Hermione were too close to risk it. So she kept her secret...for Harry.

It was those nights, they both lay awake talking about boys, about the upcoming wedding, about things that neither cared about. They talked to fill the silence of the night because they were both concerned that if the silence was left open, that they would fill it with their secrets. The girls had thought they were friends, but there had always been something separating them, there had always been Harry. Their primary loyalty had always been to him and not to each other.

He was gone now.

Ginny looked across the garden at Severus' retreating figure.

"The white line through his mark, that's new."

"Yes," Hermione replied tersely, but Ginny caught the slight smile on the woman's lips.

They were silent for several moments. Finally Ginny spoke.

"I don't care about my life. I don't care about my soul. I want him dead. Beyond that, nothing matters to me. I'll do whatever you need me to do, however I fit into your plans."

Hermione nodded.

"All the pieces are in place. Tomorrow we pay the Minister a little visit."

Ginny's eyes lit up. The man who had given her the diary, who had started it all...

"Sorry Gin, but I'm going to have to ask you to stay here. This is a delicate mission, one that must be accomplished subtlety. Your magic is..."

"I understand."

"You'll get your chance, Ginny. Don't worry, you'll get your chance."

Ginny stared off into the distance.

"I want a pensive when you get back. I want to see the look on the bastard's face when he realizes it's all over."

o

o

o

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed the story (over 300 reviews!!). Please keep them coming, they help me evaluate how I'm doing. Sorry this chapter took me a while to write. I'd love to know what you thought of it. Please review!


	18. The Ministry Falls

18: The Ministry Falls

The band of six hooded figures strode down shiny marble corridors of the ministry, silently disabling all who stood in their way. It was late, only a few guards remained on duty at this hour, so the group had little trouble with their task. They finally reached the door they sought and disabled the last of the guards which stood outside. Four of the figures stepped into formation and stood guard outside the door while the other two slipped silently inside.

O

o

The office of the Minister had changed greatly under the reign of Lucius Malfoy. What had once been a drab governmental administrative center now resembled an opulent palace. The Minister himself sat at his large carved wooden desk, reading through some papers and sipping a glass of firewhisky. At the sound of the door opening, he looked up, his long blond hair falling away from his face. As he saw the hooded figures enter the room, he reached for the wand that sat on the corner of his desk, but it flew out of his reach before he even touched it and into the open grasp of the taller of the figures. The figure tucked the wand into his robes before lowering his hood. Lucius had to fight hard to keep his mask of indifference from slipping away.

"Severus," he greeted the wizard cautiously, raising his eyebrow.

"Lucius."

"My old friend. How have you been? Are you a ghost or have we all been misled."

"No, not a ghost."

"Ah."

It was betrayal, then. Of course.

The second figure lowered its hood and Lucius saw the face of the woman underneath, the corners of his lips twisting upwards to a dark grin. Even on what he knew to be the doorstep of his own death, he could appreciate the irony of the situation.

"Severus, don't tell me you're fucking this mudblood whore."

Severus raised his wand and was about to hex the man when he felt a hand on his arm, stilling his motion. She stepped in front of him, facing the blond man. When she spoke, her tone was an eerie calm.

"First of all, don't call me a mudblood. Secondly, I am not a whore. But you were right with your third assertion. He is most definitely fucking me." A flick of her wand and bright red gashes appeared on his pristine cheeks as blood started to drip down his face.

"On your knees." She ordered, wand still trained on him. He slid out of his chair and onto the floor, knees sinking into the lush carpet.

This was his fault, really. He had underestimated her. He had thought that by taking away her wand he could make her a muggle. He had thought she would no longer be a threat to him. He had obviously been wrong.

His eyes focused on the dark piece of wood in her hand.

"I see you got yourself another wand."

"I did."

She lowered her wand and tucked it into her robes. She then reached over and pulled the Minister's own wand from her lover's grasp. Lucius watched her hold it, balancing it lightly on her palm. He wondered if she was going to cast a spell on him with his own wand.

She made eye contact with him, holding him in a hard stare for several long moments, Then with a sudden crack, she snapped his wand across her knee and flung the broken pieces towards his face. He flinched as one of the splintered pieces nicked his cheek. He heard the wood hit the stone floor behind him with a hollow echo.

So it was over then, this life he had lived. All he could hope for was maybe a few more moments.

His attention turned back towards his dark-haired friend.

"If our master knew…."

Severus pulled up his sleeve, revealing the black mark cut in two by a white line of blank flesh.

"Your master, Lucius. Your master."

He looked back towards the girl…woman in his office. There was only one type of magic that could have cut through the dark mark. That explained some things. He thought back the girl she had been, the impertinent mudblood in his son's classes, Harry's Potter's friend. How could a man like Severus Snape be attracted to a girl like her? But she wasn't a girl, was she, not any more. She hadn't been for a long time. And he had been the one who had done that to her, who had forced her to grow up, to become as secretive and as ruthless as he knew she must have been to have survived this long.

"How long, Severus? How long have you been fighting against me?"

"For far longer than I was fighting beside you...Since almost the beginning."

The blond man once more turned his attention to the woman who stood before him.

"What is it that you think you're doing here?"

Her mouth cracked open into a grin.

"Taking over the wizarding world, of course."

"It won't be this easy with The Dark Lord. He surrounds himself with powerful wizards. You won't be able to sneak in and take him down with just the two of you."

"Of course not," she laughed a short and humorless laugh. He felt her soft hair against his neck as she bent down to whisper in his ear. "We have an army." He shivered.

And although he should have been thinking about how this wouldn't just be his death, but the death of everything he had fought for, the stray thought occurred to him, 'this is the last time I will ever feel a woman's breath against my ear.'

"You won't get away with this." Even though public opinion had been turning against the ministry, an assassination of this magnitude would only fan the flames of people's fears and send them running back into the government's open arms.

Severus reached down and buried his fist into the man's hair, pulling up sharply. Lucius' head snapped up and Severus pulled harder, coming away with a handful of long golden-white hairs in his hand. He stuffed all but one hair into his pocket and removed a vial from his robes. Dropping the hair into the vial, he locked eyes with his onetime friend.

"You're right, I won't. You will."

He drank the potion and stood still as he became a mirror-image of the man facing him. The minister watched helplessly as his double cast the curse. He watched the green light move towards him as if in slow motion. It was beautiful. Why had he never noticed how beautiful the sickly green of the Avada Kedavara was? And then….nothing.

O

o

The two figures stood in silence over the dead body. The man who had only minutes earlier held such tremendous power was not nothing but a pile of skin and bones on the floor. The hard chest she had thrown the broken pieces of her wand at so many years ago no longer moved in and out. His blood seeped into the rich carpet.

"It's not a hero's death," she whispered, staring at the body.

"No. It's not. But I don't think Lucius ever thought he would die a hero's death. I think he always knew he would die like this, face-down on an expensive rug." Maybe it was why he had spent so much money on it.

Severus nudged the dead man's face with his boot, turning it upwards.

"Lucius' fight was never on the battlefield. His battlefield was a shifting network of loyalties and alliances, hushed conversations in ballrooms and board rooms. He operated behind the scenes. It makes sense that he should die in a silent coup. I think it was what he always expected."

Severus waved his wand and vanished the body, leaving nothing but thin air in the place of a man who had caused so much chaos and destruction.

He looked over at his wife. She looked empty. Had she thought that revenge would make her feel any better? But this wasn't revenge to her, it was a necessary step in the Plan. And each step drew them closer and closer to the dreaded but inevitable end. It was time to begin the next phase now. They wouldn't see each other again for a week. She didn't kiss him goodbye, not when he was in the form of her enemy, of the man they had just killed.

Only one figure emerged from the room. With a short nod to the others, the group took off back down the shiny black corridor, the squeak of their footsteps against the polished marble the only sound echoing down the long corridors.

When they reached the entrance, a lone figure stood waiting for them in the vast openness of the main hall. Hermione took a deep breath and looked around, remembering the battle that had raged here in her fifth year between Harry, Voldemort, and Dumbledore. Two of the men were now dead, if everything went according to plan, the third would soon follow.

"I trust everything went according to plan."

"Yes. Our talk with the Minister was very productive. Thank you for your assistance."

"It was the least I could do."

Seamus lowered his voice.

"The things I said about Harry, I never…"

"I know. You did what you had to do. I don't blame you, Seamus. Never, not for one second did I think you had betrayed us."

"Thank you."

x

x

The corridor was empty but for a bit of pale blue moonlight illuminating the cracks between the stones. It was late, far later than she should have been out, but here she was wandering the hallways of the school. She couldn't sleep, not tonight when she knew something was happening. It had become a habit lately, to wander these hallways. She liked the feeling of slipping from one shadow to the next. She liked the feeling of being invisible.

Suddenly she heard footsteps, many footsteps, and Dahlia stepped back, melting seamlessly into the shadow behind her. She held her breath as the figures approached. She had seen them leave earlier in the night, six cloaked figures. She had recognized two of them by their forms, even under the heavy black cloaks. She counted the figures. There were only five now.

The group stopped not far from where she was hidden. They pulled down their hoods, revealing the familiar faces: The headmistress, Professor Phelps, Professor Thomas, Professor Smith, Professor Barcel. She knew now who was missing, who had not returned.

She watched as the headmistress dismissed the rest of the team who all took off their separate ways down the hallway. But the headmistress did not leave immediately. Instead, she stood gazing out the window by herself for a few moments.

Something on the headmistress' robes caught Dahlia's eye. It was hard to make out was it was in the blue moonlight, but a something on the sleeve of her robe caught the light different than the rest.

It wasn't until she turned and walked away, passing dangerously close to the shadow in which Dahlia stood hidden, that the faint scent reached the girl and she realized what it had been that had caught the light differently. It was blood.

O

o

Hermione stepped in the door to her office, closing it behind her and leaning back against it, letting it support her as the full weight of what she had just done hit her. She had just staged a coup, assassinating the minister of magic in his own office and leaving her husband disguised to pose as him, spending the next several weeks in the stronghold of her enemy.

She brought of head up and realized that she was not alone in her office. Perched on the corner of her desk was her red-headed friend in a loose green dress, one leg up tucked under her on the desk while the other swung freely.

"Did you kill the bastard?"

"Yes."

"Can I see?"

Her eyes shifted to the pensive that had been placed on her desk in her absence.

She placed the memory inside and waited while her friend viewed it.

When Ginny's face emerged from the object, a huge grin was spread across it.

"Thank you."

The victory had been hollow for Hermione, had left her feeling empty, but for Ginny it had been a sweet revenge on the man who had put an early end to her childhood.

Hermione sat down at her desk, letting herself sink into the chair, exhausted. Ginny settled herself into one of the armchairs.

"Do you have anything to drink?"

The headmistress narrowed her eyes in a disapproving way, but then sighed. It had, after all, been a long night. She reached into one of the lower drawers of her desk and withdrew a bottle of firewhisky. Pouring two glasses, she handed one to her friend and raised hers in a silent toast to the man who had changed both of their lives in one way or another.

They drank in silence for a few moments, contemplating the wizard.

"You just overthrew the order of the wizarding world and no one even knows it yet."

"I know."

"Bellatrix Lestrange won't be as easy, she'll put up more of a fight. She's gotten powerful, some say as powerful as Voldemort himself."

"And we have an army to take her down."

Hermione stared into the amber-colored liquid of the drink in her hand.

"Dumbledore would have been proud," Ginny said softly.

"I'm sure he would have," she said almost bitterly before taking another sip of her drink.

Ginny looked at her curiously.

"Dumbledore meant, I think, for me to do something like this. I've been thinking about it a lot recently...the Time-Turner in my third year...I think he was testing me."

"Testing you?"

"Testing to see if I could keep a secret, something big, from even my closest friends. At that point he had meant to live, but I think it was a test to see how useful I could be in the future. And I passed, didn't I? Kept it from even my closest friends until he told me I could tell Harry and Ron. And the worst part was, that they didn't trust me any less for keeping that secret from them. It was...too easy."

"We all had our secrets," Ginny whispered sadly.

Hermione refilled their glasses and raised hers again.

"To Harry."

"There was so much he never told me."

"And so much you never told him."

"I was trying to protect him, to protect myself."

"He was trying to protect you too."

"I should have done more. I shouldn't have let him lock me away. I should have been with him, beside him when he died. I should have tried to stop it."

There was a tapping at the window. Hermione walked over it and opened it. A small black own flew inside, dropping a piece of parchment on the floor in front of her. She bent down to pick it up and carefully opened it.

_They're close to finding the school. Voldemort will be at Hogwarts in one week. -P  
_

She looked up at Ginny.

"It's from my spy. Things are happening quickly. We need to move up our timetable. We need to attack first."


	19. Stones

19: Stones

Time had always passed quickly for her, even without the time-turner. There had never been enough hours in a day, never enough days in a week. Time had always sped by for her. But now, when she wanted it to pass the most, each second dragged by her slowly. Each moment awaiting his return seemed to last an eternity.

She had thrown herself into her work as she had always done, but this time it wasn't enough to provide the necessary distraction. Even as she read through the Plan time and time again her mind wandered…to him, always to him.

Her fingers drummed against the hard surface of the desk nervously. She was on edge, had been for weeks now. She was holding it together on the outside, for everyone else's sakes, but inside she was falling apart.

She glanced nervously at the window. Still nothing. Still no sign of him.

As she turned her face back to the meeting she was supposed to be listening to, she met Ginny's eyes. Her friend leaned in closer to her and whispered gently in her ear.

"He was a spy for nearly thirty years, Hermione. I'm sure he can handle a few weeks in the Ministry of Magic."

Her husband had spent the last week inside the ministry, dismantling it from the inside piece by piece. She knew…she _knew_ that this was something he could do, something that he was good at. He was a stealthy, powerful wizard. But still….still she worried.

She focused her attention back on the meeting. They were going over the plan one last time before they set it into action. After all these years of waiting, of planning, of building, there would finally be open war…for better or for worse.

It had been a week ago that she had received word from her spy, Pansy, that Voldemort would be making a visit to Hogwarts following the end of the term. It was the perfect opportunity to strike. The manor where he spent most of his time was so well protected that it was nearly impenetrable. At Hogwarts they had the advantage of the vast amount of knowledge of the wards that Severus had gained while headmaster there. Also, a group of his elite followers were aware of Hermione's school and were working nonstop to locate it. The last she had heard they had developed spells for sensing magical usage…it wouldn't be long now before the identified the school as a hotspot.

And so, she had taken the step that Dumbledore had either been unwilling or unable to take, she had set into motion an attack. The older wizard's strategy had always been defensive, but Hermione was bold enough to make the first move. Maybe it was the fact that as a rebel force, the Death Eaters had been elusive in Dumbledore's time while now they operated out in the open. But maybe he had simply never been able to justify being the instigator of a war to himself. Hermione had watched him closely, had learned from his mistakes. On defense you had nothing to gain and everything to lose. She would not make the same mistakes, she would not be forced to fight this war on her territory. She would bring the war to the Dark Lord. She would bring war to Hogwarts.

And so a plan had been set into motion, had been analyzed inside and out day and night. Today it would begin. The wards around Hogwarts prevented apparition within a certain radius around the school. Beyond that, they sensed magical activity. The plan was to apparate just out of the primary wards. Because the secondary wards would still sense the magic, this had to be done slowly, only a few wizards at a time for days until they had accumulated sufficient numbers to begin the attack.

Ginny spoke up.

"Bellatrix Lestrange might be more of a challenge. Some say she's grown almost as powerful as Voldemort. And she's unpredictable."

Hermione ran her finger over the scar on the front of her neck, the slightly raised white line on the tender flesh. So much had happened after then, even before, so many dark and painful curses. But she had never forgotten the witch holding her tightly with the sharp blade of the knife digging into her neck. Somehow, death had never seemed so close.

The meeting ended and she took one last look at the school she had built from nothing before she apparated to the grounds outside of Hogwarts. Ginny appeared by her side a moment later. The site they had chosen was barely visible from Hogwarts, in the opposite direction of the Dark Forest. There was a group of trees that hid their site from the school. On the other side of the trees was a ridge and then a large grassy valley and finally in the distance...Hogwarts, the home of some of her best and some of her worst memories.

An advance team had been setting up the area and the camp was well underway when she arrived. They would spend the night here. Tents had already been erected for those who would arrive enough ahead of time to get some sleep before the attack in the morning.

After making sure everything was going according to schedule, she cast some defensive wards to keep the area safe and then found Ginny to resume their conversation.

"About what you were saying about Bellatrix earlier..."

"I just don't want anyone to underestimate her power."

"I know, I've heard the same thing from other sources. She's our next most important target after Voldemort."

Ginny nodded, satisfied and changed the subject, glancing up at Hermione out of the corner of her eye.

"I spoke with Dahlia before we left."

The two of them had been spending a lot of time together. Hermione suspected that Ginny was trying to cling to that last little bit of Harry she could find.

"Hermione, I know you're trying to protect her, to shield her, but she needs to know what's going on."

"She is just a child."

"You forget that this all involves her. It involves her family, her past, and now you. You and Severus are like family to her now…she is involved in this whether you want her to be or not. She is an orphan and now she stands to lose everything she has and she at least deserves to know why."

Hermione was quiet for a moment. She knew that. She had seen how Harry had reacted as he had lost person after person who had stepped into the role of parent to him. She had known how much Dahlia stood to loose, but hadn't been able to bring herself to face it.

"Thank you...for talking to her. I wanted to, I just didn't know what to say."

Hermione left her friend and walked by herself and stood on the ridge that faced Hogwarts, letting the fierce wind blow through her hair. Finally, she heard footsteps behind her and turned her head slightly to see who was approaching. It was her husband.

She studied his rumpled hair and the dark circles under his eyes as he approached. It appeared that she was not the only one who had had sleepless nights.

He reached the spot where she stood and pulled her into a long, deep, desperate kiss.

"You're late," she whispered against his mouth, as if they were an ordinary couple and he was nothing more than a husband who had been at the office and shown up twenty minutes late for dinner.

It was answered by a low chuckle. "I got held up at the Ministry."

"How is the Ministry doing?"

"It is now a complete disaster. It has imploded over the last few weeks, losing both the confidence and the trust of most of the wizarding world. People now want change."

"Then we are ready for the final stage of the plan."

She pulled away from him and stared once more into the distance.

"I knew this day would come. From the first day, even from before I started this, I could see how it would end."

They stood on the ridge. There was Hogwarts in the distance. They were far enough away to be safe, far enough not to be spotted. But they could see the towers in the distance, from here only a tiny speck in the vast landscape. The sight caused a hard knot of dread in her stomach. It was all she could do to hold her lunch down.

"This is the first time I've been back here since…"

"Since," he said, taking her trembling hand in his.

This place that she hadn't seen in nearly eleven years still burned as freshly in her memory as the day she had first set foot there. She knew every stone. She had visited them in her nightmares more often than she was willing to admit. To her, the stones were still wet with the blood of those she had loved, those who had died there.

He took her hand and led her into the soft candlelight of their tent.

Once inside, he lay her down on the bed, unbuttoning her shirt and kissing her pink nipples until she squirmed under him. He had spent so many of his late nights at the ministry dreaming of this.

Kissing her, he caressed her soft skin with his fingertips, savoring every sensation, trying to etch this feeling into his memory so that he would never forget. He ran his mouth over her skin, knowing that no matter what happened tomorrow, he would have this... this one beautiful, perfect moment in a lifetime of darkness. It was enough.

She moaned and arched her naked body up against him and he wasted no time giving her what she wanted.

He thrust into her desperately, frantically, savoring every stroke. He came with a loud groan. He stopped moving and she immediately pushed him off of her with all her strength. This was not what he was expecting. He toppled, naked, off of her and onto the hard floor.

"What was that for?" he asked angrily, standing up.

"Don't ask me questions you already know the answers to," she bit back, reaching for her clothes.

"What did I do?" Sure, he had been rough, but she usually liked that.

Pulling her shirt over her head, she stepped forward and slapped him, hard. His cheek stung with the force of it.

"You know what you did."

"I don't."

"How could you? How could you do that to me?" She was screaming at him now, her eyes shining with anger.

"I…" He started, but that was as far as he got.

"You fucked me like it was the last time," she accused.

He had nothing to say to that. He knew the odds they were going up against tomorrow and he had wanted to take all he could from life, he had wanted to take as much as he could from her, to give her as much as he could while he still had the chance. He stood there silently as she glared at him.

"Hermione, there's a chance," he said softly.

"No," she said, "No. Don't you dare. Don't you dare leave me." Her voice was low and venomous now, almost deadly. He wouldn't leave her, not if he had a choice. But if there was one thing he had learned during his life, it was that his fate wasn't always his own to decide. She stormed out of the tent, leaving him there alone in the candlelight.

He found her later, sitting alone on a log and staring off into the distance in the blue-grey half-light of dusk. Everyone had noticed the change in their commander and gave her space.

He studied her from a few yards away. He knew better than to think that her breakdown tonight had been just about him. There were things from her past that she hadn't dealt with. He had been forced to walk the halls where those he had fought beside had fallen for ten years. It stung every day, but eventually the pain had subsided into a deep, dull ache. She had walked away. She had visited these halls only in her nightmares since then. They would be fresh with ghosts for her.

He walked over to where she sat. Her eyes were glazed and distant, looking through time instead of space.

She needed to pull it together if they had any hope of not being massacred the next day.

Severus took her hand and led her up the grassy ridge behind the camp. She let him lead her without a word. Finally they reached the top of the ridge and they looked down into a lush valley. She had never been this far on the Hogwarts grounds…if this even was still on the grounds. They started their way down into the valley. As they reached the bottom of the grassy slope, she noticed a ring of small stones in the grass. It had been imperceptible from higher up the ridge. Severus let go of her hand and stood silently as she wandered into the wide circle of stones.

There were other stones, spaced widely and evenly within the circle. These stones were smooth and grey as opposed to the jagged white ones that marked the boundary of the circle. She knelt down in the soft grass and picked up one of the smooth grey stones. She ran her fingers across it and turned it over in her hands. On the other side, a few marking had been scratched deeply into the stone: _NL_. She looked up at Severus, who gave her a short nod.

Placing the stone she held back into the indentation in the grass where she had found it, she picked up another. This one had a similar scrawling on one side: _FW_. And another: _MM_. And another: _RL_. And another: _RW_ She made her way slowly around the circle, picking up each stone and running her fingers over the initials inscribed in it. Finally, she picked up the final stone. The marking on the back read _HP_. She sat in the grass and held the stone and felt warm salty tears roll down her cheeks for the first time in a very, very long time.

She wasn't sure how long she sat there, holding the cool stone in her warm hand. There was a rustle of robes behind her as the wizard sat beside her in the tall grass, reaching up to wipe the tears from her face with the sleeve of his shirt. He then placed his arms around her and his hands around hers which still held the stone.

"I had heard…the newspapers reported…that the bodies were burned."

"Yes. That was what the Dark Lord ordered me to do."

"How did you get them here? How did you bury them without anyone noticing?"

"The House Elves. I ordered them to do it and they apparated the bodies here and marked the stones."

He sat with her in silence. Finally she stood and placed the stone back into the grass.

"I'm ready," she told him, with an air of finality and confidence she had misplaced over the past few days. He stood up as well and followed her back over the ledge, back to camp, to get a few restless hours of sleep before they met what awaited them in the morning light.

x

x

_A/N: Please Please Please Review!_


	20. The Third War

20: The Third War

Severus didn't sleep that night. How could he? He laid on the bed next to his wife staring into the darkness.

He was well aware of the implications the coming day had, a day unlike any other. He had switched sides, after all, every time a war ended. Severus was always on the losing side. But this time, he was openly declaring his loyalty.

He had no illusions that the Dark Lord would forgive him for his deceptions if the light fell. There would be no switching sides this time, it was victory or death.

Finally the first early light of morning came and he became aware of a shadow cast against the fabric of their tent. Someone was standing on the other side, waiting. He stepped outside with his wand in his hand, but was greeted by the sight of an ally, not an enemy. The redhead stood a few paces from the tent, leaning against a tree. He put his wand away.

"I wanted to talk to you."

"I can wake Hermione." He started to turn back towards the tent.

She shook her head.

"Just you."

She motioned away from the opening of the tent towards the edge of the forest. He followed her. They stepped into a small clearing, well-hidden by trees.

"You and I," she started, "I never would have expected this, Snape, to have so much in common with you. We came to this place in different ways, willing or unwilling, but we have both been marked by the dark. My soul is in tatters. Yours, I suspect, is not much better off."

"What is your point, Miss Weasley?"

"My point is that we are dispensable. It is _her_ who must survive."

He nodded solemnly, he had already known this. The young woman continued.

"The world will go on without the two of us, but she needs to survive and she needs to survive with her soul intact. There needs to be someone to put the world back together after this whole mess is finished and that person needs to be her."

He knew this, understood why she was telling him. It would be up to the two of them to make sure that Hermione didn't risk her life or in a desperate attempt, venture into the dark magic that would taint her soul. The survivors would look to her as a leader and a tainted soul would undermine her credibility, destroy their trust in her. To lead, she needed to be pure.

The two of them had already been marked by it, had been taken in by it...they had nothing else to lose but their lives. He studied the young woman before him, well aware of the dark magic that was pulsing through her veins, that had been since she was eleven years old.

"I've been practicing some spells…I was wondering if I could discuss them with you…discuss which ones you think would be best to use if I get the chance."

There was no need for her to explain, he knew the implication...these were dark spells. Why else would she come to him? They spent the next hour discussing uses for different dark curses and hexes. Finally, she got up to leave.

"One more thing, Miss Weasley...about Dahlia."

She looked at him curiously.

"If the circumstance arises….If by some circumstance you survive this and Hermione and I do not….will you…."

She gave him a quick nod.

"I'll take care of her."

He wasn't sure if it was the best idea to leave the care of a child to a half-insane escaped prisoner, but Potter had seemed to find comfort in having his godfather around…maybe Dahlia would find similar comfort.

He looked once more at the young woman who stood before him, at the look of quiet determination on her face. She was ready to face death...too ready. No doubt ready to join her love wherever he had gone.

He knew better than anyone, after all, he had fallen in love with that same set of green eyes.

She turned to leave and he spoke to her back.

"Miss Weasley….Ginny, when I was quite young, I fell in love with a girl. She was killed and I thought I would never again feel the same way about anyone…but I eventually did." He had wanted to die too, had agreed to become a spy with reckless disregard for his own life. He had wished for death for many years. It was not until recently, until Hermione, that he had regained his desire to live.

Ginny paused, hesitated a moment and then turned back to face him.

"The girl, the one you loved when you were younger…she didn't love you back, did she?"

"No."

She glared at him, her brown eyes fierce.

"Then don't talk to me about moving on."

There was a rustle of leaves and they both turned to see Hermione step into the clearing.

"I was wondering where you two had gone..." she stated, glancing between the two suspiciously. Neither said a word.

"We're ready to begin the attack."

Severus followed Hermione back to the camp, leaving Ginny in the wood alone for a moment. Her thoughts turned, as always, to Harry, to what might have been.

She could have been his rock, his confidante, his partner...but he already had Hermione for that. What he had needed was a dream, a belief in an after, something to _want_. So she had hidden her darkness, her pain, had put on make-up and done her hair and flirted with boys even though it was killing her inside. When he kissed her and let her go at Dumbledore's funeral, she knew she had succeeded. She wanted nothing more than to follow him to the ends of the world, but she knew that standing by his side would shatter his distant dream of her. He needed that dream.

But in the end, even the dream had not been enough.

There were so many times she had wanted to talk to him about how she felt. Who else would understand? Who else had walked so close to the darkness, had let it posess them, had even come to crave the posession?

She would be with him again, of that she was sure. She would hold him again, would tell him everything she had never told him, would ask his forgiveness.

She could hear him sometimes. She had heard him while she was in Azkaban in the early hours of the morning, when it was neither light nor dark, when the only sound was that of water slowly dropping one drip at a time...she would hear his voice, drifting through the cracks, calling to her, beckoning her from beyond the veil.

She could hear the voice now, drifting in the wind, through the trees from somewhere deep within the forest.

"I'll be there soon, Harry," she whispered before turning and following the same path Hermione and Severus had followed back to camp.

x

x

The plan was set into motion. They would walk to Hogwarts. The Dark Lord would sense large expenditures of magic, but if they simply walked the distance, they would have the benefit of arriving unannounced. The Dark Lord simply would not expect anything so….muggle.

And so they walked, teachers and former students from Hermione's school alongside members of Dumbledore's Army. It was silent most of the way, as each person contemplated what awaited them at the end of their journey. The walk took almost all day and it was late in the afternoon by the time they reached Hogwarts.

Hermione's heart beat loudly in her chest, the Dark Lord was there.

When they reached the castle, there was no more need for secrecy or subtlety. Disabling the Death Eaters who stood guard outside, they flung open the doors of the school and marched inside.

The Great Hall had been turned into a throne room for the duration of Voldemort's visit. There were hundreds of Death Eaters there for the ceremony, the anniversary of their victory...set in the place where it had happened. The doors to the Great Hall were flung open with force and all heads turned to look, saw the invading army...and then all hell broke loose.

Curses were flying as they ducked through the crowd. Hermione glanced at Ginny and Severus beside her, fighting off attacks from every angle. Through the mass of people she saw Bellatrix Lestrange off to one side and made a note of her location...she would deal with her later...after Voldemort...

Hermione moved through the warfare watching her students, her former students, battle for their lives. She watched them use the spells they had carefully studied in her classroom, that she had helped them perfect, in order to injure, to protect, to kill.

She was nervous, scared for all of them. She knew all their strengths but also their weaknesses. She sent out a spell to block the curse directed at one of her former students...he had never been very good at shield charms.

She wasn't sure which way this battle would go. At her school she had developed new spells that would give them an advangate, but the wizards and witches she had taught, although many were proficient in defensive and offensive spells, had no practical experience. Sure, they had practiced duels, but none of that compared to the heart-pounding reality of a life-or-death battle.

She belatedly regretted not implementing a house system at her school. The intense rivalries had led, after all, to the skirmishes in the corridors that had given her, Harry, and Ron their first real experience at dueling. She had always seen sorting the students into houses as being divisive...but maybe that had been the point.

Severus took down the appartition wards from inside the school, the wards that still recognized him as Headmaster. They would be able to apparate out now if they needed to. Severus, Hermione and Ginny fought their way through the battle, through the mass of death eaters until they reached the Dark Lord.

Those red eyes fixated on Severus, for the first time realizing the betrayal.

Severus tightened his grip on his wand and moved to take a step forward, when he felt a small hand on his arm. He dared not turn from the Dark Lord to see who it was. He heard a voice whisper in his ear, a voice that practically crackled with dark magic.

"Severus, it should be me. You have something to live for, someone to live for. Let me do this."

Her conversation with him that morning...she had never meant it to be _one_ of them...she had meant it to be _her_. She had talked to him that morning, to explain the sacrifice she was planning to make, to let him know not to stop her.

And with that, the redhead released his arm and stepped in front of him.

"Ginny," came a shriek from behind him and he turned to see Hermione running for her friend. He caught her in his arms and held her tightly as she fought against him.

"Hello, Tom," the woman said, a twisted smile playing across her face as she stepped towards the dark wizard.

Severus watched her approach the madman and an image of the little girl she had been flashed across his mind.

And as the woman she had become locked wands with the Dark Lord, Severus thought back, to before she had gone to Azkaban, to before the deaths of her six brothers, of her parents, to before Potter's death, to before she had led Dumbledore's Army on their acts of midnight rebellion, to before she had taken on the darkest wizards in the Department of Mysteries...back even, to before the diary...if there even was a before the diary...

She had been possessed in her first year, so close to the beginning. He tried to think back to those first few days, few weeks of her time at Hogwarts, before the diary had started to take hold, but found that he had no memory of her from that time.

A red bolt shot from her wand and the dark wizard blocked it and smirked at her.

What had she been like before the diary?

Potter had gotten a quick glimpse of her on his way to Hogwarts, but by the time she arrived there herself, that girl was already gone. She had spent the rest of her time there pretending to be that girl, acting the part convincingly...for him, always for him.

A shot of blue-violet light came out of Voldemort's wand, grazing Ginny's arm who gasped in pain.

Hermione struggled in Severus' arms, desperate to help her friend, the last of her childhood friends, but he held her tightly against him. With her arms pinned to her sides, she was unable to use magic. She stomped on his foot and kicked him in the shin and bit his arm and tried to wrench herself from his grasp, but she was much smaller than him and it was a hopeless struggle.

"Please, Severus. Please let me go."

Tears rolled down her cheeks, but he didn't lessen his grip on her. If there was to be an after to this war, she would need to be there for it, and she would need a soul that was whole. His job was to make sure that happened.

And so, he held her to him tightly even as she struggled in his arms, held her in place to watch her friend die.

The wizard and witch in front of them paced around each other as if in a dance, firing off and blocking spell after spell.

Finally, one of Ginny's spells met it's mark, slicing an angry hex through Voldemort's thigh. He could feel the power in it...it was obviously a very powerful dark magic. He looked up at her.

"But how….who taught you?" he croaked.

"You did, Tom."

His face did not show so much as a flicker of surprise...or it could just be that he was no longer capable of emotion.

He had created the weapon of his own destruction just as he had always feared he would. It was why he had hunted down Harry Potter, after all. In a world where he had absolute power, he had become his own worst enemy. None would have the power to create a weapon powerful enough to destroy him...except himself.

They both shot off a spell at the same time and their wands locked in a fire of magic and light. The spells were both dark, both incredibly powerful. The connection crackled and burned, both wizards practically glowed with power. The spells intensified, locked in their stalemate as they both held tightly to their wands, the magic surged.

Hermione screamed.

They couldn't keep it up for much longer, that amount of magic, that amount of power surging through them in the closed loop they had created was enough to kill them both, yet neither was willing to disengage first.

"You're going to die, Ginevra," Voldemort said calmly.

"I'm taking you with me, Tom."

Severus realized that she had been waiting for this moment since she was eleven years old, that she had been attracted to Potter partially because he shared her goal, complete destruction of this man...revenge.

And without breaking eye contact, without breaking the spells locked between their two wands, another spell left her lips. It was one that Severus had taught her that morning, one to increase the power to unthinkable, suicidal levels. The power between them intensified and then burst in a flash of light and power...and they were both gone.

x

x

Hermione and Severus made their way among the bodies, studying the faces of both fallen friend and foe.

They reached the end of the carnage outside the main doors of the school. Severus stared off into the distance and then suddenly, his expression turned to stone.

"Where's Bella?"

Hermione froze.

"She wasn't among the dead."

Their eyes scanned the horizon. There was a cold breeze blowing.

"Maybe she ran," Hermione suggested, but even as the words were coming out of her mouth she knew they weren't true.

"She wouldn't run." Severus said quietly. "She was never one to back away from a fight." There was a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach. The look of panic in Hermione's eyes told him she was thinking the same thing. Her school…had they found it?

"Grab some people and meet me there," he said quickly and then apparated. She ran to the nearest group of fighters and then followed close behind.

It was all a blur as she grabbed the group of teachers and former students, close to ten in all and instructed them to apparate immediately back to the school. She said nothing once they had all arrived in the dark apparition chamber, but strode quickly toward the door and threw it open.

The sight that greeted her nearly stopped her heart. A group of death eaters had surrounded the children on out on the grounds and in the background, her school, her beloved school was in the process of burning to the ground.

She had to find Severus.

x

x

One of the young wizards who had accompanied Hermione quickly apparated back to the battlefield at Hogwarts and returned seconds later with even greater numbers.

She tore through the mass of death eaters, fighting as she had never fought before, firing off spell after spell. She was normally cool, intelligent, collected, even in battle, but she fought recklessly now, furiously, full of a protective instinct for her students, for her school, for all she had created.

She had always fought with logic, pulling spells out of her memory and executing them with quick precision. It was what had always separated her from Harry. Now she fought with the blind rage, with the instinctive, emotional fury he had always possessed. She felt a curse strike her side but she kept fighting, ignoring the pain, oblivious to the wetness on her robes as blood seeped out of the wound. They had taken her childhood, her family, her friends. They had taken her wand, Harry, Ron, Ginny...she would not let them take her school.

After a quick but harsh battle, the death eaters lay unconscious in a pile. Hermione held her side as blood poured out. Severus watched her with concern as he held his own arm. His shoulder was most likely dislocated.

He watched as Hermione walked slowly over to the group of death eaters and pulled the masks off one by one. She turned to face Severus, the last mask still in her hand, leaning on a tree for support as she struggled not to collapse.

"She's not here. Bellatrix wasn't one of them" They stood frozen, eyes locked on each other as the world moved in fast forward around them. Teachers ran to help the injured students. There was blood everywhere. In the normally peaceful garden, the usual noises of birds and wind were drowned out by the frantic yelling and quick footsteps as the older witches and wizards did their best to heal the most seriously injured.

Then there was a sound. It was small and faint, but it cut through all the other sounds. It was the distant scream of a young girl. Hermione stumbled. She had lost so much blood, too much.

"Where's Dahlia?"

Severus turned from her and started to run towards the burning building. Hermione fell to her knees, helpless to do anything but watch him go. She couldn't lose them both…she had already lost too much.

x

x

Severus tore through the halls, wildly flinging open classroom doors. Smoke poured through the hallways. He could hardly breathe. Then there was another scream, louder, closer than the first. He turned to his right and threw the door open. And there she was, Bellatrix Lestrange in all her wild glory. She held the girl against her with her wand at the girl's neck. Dahlia's eyes were wide with fear.

He stepped in through the open doorway

"Let her go, Bella."

"Hello, Severus," she purred, her lips curving into a wicked smile.

"I'm warning you," he threatened her calmly, dryly, authoritatively, hand holding his wand steady.

She pulled the girl tighter against her and he involuntarily flinched with panic. All those years as a spy had been for nothing...he had given himself away. Bella's smile grew wider.

"You care for the girl?" she taunted in disbelief, "You care for the little mudblood?"

He opened his mouth and felt the curse curl on the tip of his tongue. He could taste it already, feel its magic in his mouth, in his bones. Bellatrix saw his lips part and she pulled the girl closer to her, digging her wand sharply into the soft flesh of the girl's neck until she cried out in pain.

"Put it down, Severus." She stated emotionlessly," Put your wand down or I kill her right now."

He hesitated for a moment and then slowly laid down his wand on the table in front of him. Bella wordlessly levitated it away from him and out the open window.

He stared at Dahlia, now powerless to do anything to help her.

"And people say he's a heartless bastard," Bellatrix smirked in triumph.

"But he has a soft spot for mudbloods. Isn't that right Dahlia, dear?"

In one quick movement, Dahlia stomped on the woman's foot, wrenched herself free from her grip and grabbed the wand from her hand. The older woman had obviously not been expecting a physical attack from such a young girl. Dahlia now stood, pointing the wand at its owner.

"How do you know my name?"

x

x

x

_A/N: Long chapter. There is probably going to be only 1 or 2 more left in this story. I've been dreading writing this chapter for a long time because it's so hard to write action scenes. Sorry about killing Ginny. I wanted her to live and move on and fall in love again...but she couldn't. If you're reading the story, please review it. I'd love to know what you think and what you'd like to see before the story ends.  
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	21. Blood

21: Blood

"How do you know my name?" Dahlia repeated, louder this time, trying to sound braver than she felt.

The wand trembled in her hand, betraying her pounding heart.

Bellatrix grinned, peering out from beneath her tangled black curls.

"How could I not know you, Dahlia Dursley?...I killed your parents."

The girl took a step backwards.

"No." A blunt refusal. She refused, simply refused to believe this.

The woman's mouth opened slowly and she smiled a wicked smile, her red lips curling around her pointy teeth.

Dahlia backed away, shaking her head. The wand shook in her hand. She had never held a wand in threat against anyone before. This wand was heavier than her own, longer. It felt foreign and awkward in her sweaty grip.

"Give me the wand, Dalia," Severus said, taking a slow step in her direction, but she didn't hear him. Her attention was focused on the woman before her.

"No," she said again, this time forcefully, almost a scream as a tear rolled down her cheek.

"It was a car accident. I was young, but I remember it. Don't lie to me. I was there. It gave me this," she pulled on the neckline of her blouse to revel a long scar that ran from her shoulder over her collarbone.

"Oh, I'm not suggesting that the car didn't swerve off the road and hit a tree. I'm just suggesting that it wasn't the rain that caused it to do so."

The girl paled. She had noticed a strange light as it happened. She had thought it was an angel.

She swallowed thickly, her mouth suddenly dry.

"Why?" she whispered, the horror of the situation hitting her. The room seemed to spin around her.

"Because," the woman's eyes flashed viciously, "I was trying to kill all the remaining blood relatives of Harry Potter. I thought I had killed you too...but apparently you lived."

Dahlia was speechless. Time seemed to stand still. She tried to think of a spell, any spell, to use as the woman lunged at her, but her mind was blank. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Severus lunge at her from the other direction. She couldn't even move. Severus was faster and his hand closed around the wand first, pulling it from Dahlia's grasp.

But Bellatrix had other weapons at her disposal and a split-second later there was a knife at the girl's throat, digging into the skin in the same place that Hermione bore a scar.

x

x

x

The world seemed very far away. Hermione felt herself be lifted and placed on a stretcher, surrounded by the familiar scents of medicinal potions. She felt hands on her side and heard a muttered healing spell. Her eyes cracked open to see the familiar yet unexpected face of the figure kneeling over her.

"It's all right, Hermione, I'm taking care of you," Lavender told her bravely, but the woman's pale face gave away the true seriousness of the injuries. Beyond Lavender she could see the smoke from her school, her precious school. It was burning. Severus and Dalia were inside, but she knew that due to the third occupant of the building, the fire wasn't their greatest threat.

"The prophecy..." she murmured in delirium, her eyes sliding shut once more.

The dying scientist always turns to religion at the last moment, after all is lost. It had been her weakness, her belief in only what could be seen and proven. At some level she had always suspected that her failure to open her mind to what was beyond the realm of reasoning would be the key to her downfall. Now she was sure of it.

"I should have listened to the prophecy," she whispered, wishing she had at least found out what it said. Instead she had smashed it against the fireplace without even so much as a second thought. She had always been curious, but her fear of things she could not control had overwhelmed her curiousity. Her hatred of divination had prevented her from gathering all the possible information at her disposal.

"The prophecy?" Lavender asked, casting a spell to stop the bleeding.

"There was a prophecy about me…"

Lavender's hands froze mid-motion.

"I know," Lavender whispered as she paled.

Hermione's eyes snapped open and she looked up at the woman.

"How?" Pansy had stolen it, only a few knew of its existence.

"I was there. I was the one…the one the prophecy was made to."

Hermione lifted herself up on one elbow and looked Lavender in the eye.

"Who? Who made the prophecy?"

"Pavarti. Soon before her death."

"What did it say, Lavender?" She couldn't help the desperate twinge that crept into her voice. "What did the prophecy say?"

Lavender glanced around her to make sure that no one was listening and then leaned down to whisper in Hermione's ear.

"You are the link, the blood connection between the savior and the one who must be saved."

Hermione's mind was spinning.

Blood magic? But for whom? She had no living blood relatives. She had established a blood connection with Severus through their marriage, but who else was there?

"Who? Who is to be saved?"

"A child," Lavender breathed. "It is the difference between another reaching the power of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and stopping it before it begins. "

Her eyes darted to the school. Dahlia. Hermione had connected herself to Harry's bloodline…a bloodline to which Dahlia also belonged. She had linked Severus and Dahlia.

Blood magic, it was passed down through the bloodlines then. Protection, sacrifice. Through birth or through the marriage ritual.

As Voldemort had died, his power had passed to his most trusted servant. Harry's power had passed to his niece. Hermione had tied herself into Harry's bloodline, into Lily's….and then brought Severus into it as well.

Severus loved the girl as a daughter, Hermione knew that. He would save her from Bella...but what would happen to him?

x

x

x

The madwoman pulled Dahlia towards her tightly. The girl's head was forced backwards, exposing her small, white neck. The sharp blade pressed against it digging into the skin and breaking it slightly as the first few drops of blood trickled down the smooth surface. Dahlia's breathing was shallow and erratic, her eyes were shut in fear and pain.

"Your master is dead, Bella," Snape tried to reason with her.

"He's been dead before."

Smoke billowed in through the window and he remembered with a sense of urgency that the building they were standing in was on fire.

"His Horcruxes are gone. He's gone forever this time."

"It makes no difference. I'm not doing this for him anymore. I will simply take his place."

"Let her go, Bella," he pleaded. "She means nothing to you. She is just a child."

She had inherited the paranoia from her former master. She had tried to kill this girl and yet the girl lived. The girl would be a threat to her until she was killed.

"She must die. You know how these things work, don't you, Severus?"

She was backing towards the window, taking the girl with her. She reached the open window and reached outside. When she drew her hand back inside, it contained a wand and he belatedly realized that when she had levitated his wand out the window, she had not let it drop to the ground, but set it on a ledge just outside.

With his wand in her hand, she released her knife-hold on the girl who scurried away from her, backing up against the wall. Bellatrix's wand followed her movement.

Severus watched the words come out of the madwoman's mouth as if in slow motion. He had seen the killing-curse used often enough to be able to recognize the shape the words made on the lips without even needing to hear them spoken. A primal scream was torn from him as he lunged in front of the curse in a desperate attempt to protect Dahlia. At that moment he knew he would die for the girl.

And then it came rushing to him, a power he had not even known he possessed.

And instead of the cold, sudden death he had expected, he felt the magic of the curse wash over both of them as they each took a part of it. He heard her small scream from behind him, but it was enough to know that she had only received a portion of the curse intended for her, that she was not dead.

It was an old magic, a magic so ancient and powerful that it could only be used in the most primitive of circumstances, the need of a parent to protect a child.

Bella's eyes widened at the implication.

"She is….she is yours?"

"Yes."

He advanced towards her.

It mattered not that he was not Dahlia's father by birth. He loved her and the magic recognized him as her father all the same.

"I killed her family." The witch insisted desperately as he pointed his wand at her.

"She got a new one."

x

x

x

Severus carried Dahlia in his arms out and away from the burning building. He had left Bellatrix Lestrange's dead body inside to burn with the rest of it. It was nothing less than what she deserved.

As he walked across the grounds with the girl in his arms, he felt strangely absolved of his guilt for Lily's death. He now knew how it felt to stand between a child and death. He now knew what her final moments had been like.

For the first time, he really accepted the fact that he had not killed Lily, she had chosen it. She had not died in pain and desperation, she had died full of love. He had not been able to save her son, but he had saved her grand-niece. His debt to her was paid and he was free at last. He understood for the first time how powerful the love for a child could be and was even more surprised that it was something of which he was capable.

He had put Lily on a pedestal for so many years, but now found that he stood beside her as her equal.

x

x

After Dahlia's injuries had been treated and she had sufficiently been fussed-over. Severus and Hermione stepped away for a moment alone.

"You look terrible," he told her, tenderly tucking a stray curl behind her ear. She did look terrible. She was pale, bloody, and utterly worn out. But she was alive, he told himself, and she loved him. She smiled a tired smile, and even as her eyes showed the depth of her mourning the loss of her friend, for the loss of her school, her lips curled in tired relief for all those who were still alive.

Severus took her in his arms and quietly recounted what had happened inside the school between him, Bellatrix and Dalia, and she told him of what she had learned of the prophecy.

When they looked back over at Dahlia, there was a boy around her age or maybe a few years older talking to her. He was tall and thin with shaggy brown hair and rumpled clothing. He was not a student at Hermione's school and had been too young to attend Hogwarts while Severus was headmaster there. Severus did not recognize the boy, but nevertheless he reminded him of someone he couldn't quite put his finger on. All he knew was that it wasn't a good memory.

"Who is that boy with Dahlia?" Severus asked, scowling.

"I'm not sure," Hermione replied, "but he looks vaguely familiar. Who is that woman he's with?"

Severus looked behind the boy to see a woman around his age looking after him, a woman he had known in his younger years.

"It's Andromeda Tonks."

Hermione's face lit up.

"Oh, so that must be Teddy Lupin."

Dahlia giggled as the boy lightly touched her shoulder. Severus looked horrified.

"Oh no."

"It's alright, Severus," she said gently. "Dahlia's dealing with a lot right now, finding out what her parents were murdered...it might help her to talk to another orphan."

But he wasn't listening to his wife. He was already moving in the direction of the two children, of the son of his childhood enemy who was touching his daughter.

"No. no. no. no. no."

Hermione laughed and turned around, coming face-to-face with a battered-looking Seamus Finnigan.

"What happens now, Hermione?" He asked intently, searching her for answers in the midst of all the chaos and destruction. He looked at her as if only she could make sense of all that had happened.

She looked over his shoulder to see a large group of wizards and witches with their attention focused on her.

"What happens now?" he asked again and everyone watched her in rapt attention. It was up to her. They were looking to her for leadership. She would remake this world, stitching back together all its shattered pieces.

x

x

_A/N: Just a shot epilogue left and then it's done. This was a hard chapter to write, I'd love to know what you thought of it. Please review!!  
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	22. Epilogue

Epilogue:

"We gather here today," she began, looking out into the crowd of hundreds who had shown up for the ceremony, "to remember the past, to remember those who gave their lives so that we might live in peace."

As she spoke, she looked out into the faces of the various wizards and witches that sat before her, but it was the faces that were absent that she saw much more clearly. She swallowed her pain and continued her speech.

"Seven years ago today, the third and final war against the dark wizard known as Voldemort was fought. This site commemorates not only those who died in that war, but those who gave their lives in the two that preceded it as well. This was not a war that was fought by a specific group of wizards, but one fought over several generations."

She gazed out past the crowd to where the circle of stones lay. More had been added to the site as those who had died in the third war had been buried.

"We would not be here today if it were not for a group of brave and dedicated witches and wizards. Some of them are here today, living in a world that they risked their lives to create. Others were not so fortunate."

She turned for a quick glance to where her husband sat. He met her gaze in a somber look that told her he was remembering the same list of names that she was.

"We can honor their memory by doing all we can to ensure that an atrocity such as this never happens again."

"As Headmistress of Hogwarts..." She looked towards where the students sat, with the faculty in the row in front of them. Pansy Parkinson was among them, clad in somber black robes. Hermione had kept her promises to her spy. She had protected her from prosecution and even given her a job at Hogwarts...as the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and Head of Slytherin.

"As Headmistress of Hogwarts, I have been working to ensure that we eliminate prejudice and discrimination from the educational system." She had taken the curriculum from the school that she had started and transferred it to Hogwarts, educating purebloods and muggleborns alike in the mixed magic and science of the muggle and magical worlds.

"The Ministry has also been doing its part to ensure fair treatment to all magical creatures." She should know, she had served as Minister of Magic for three years during the reconstruction. They had been a busy three years in which she had overhauled the entire ministry, starting from scratch and throwing out all the arcane and prejudiced laws. It had been a difficult time as wizarding society had been left in shambles from Voldemort's rule. After three years, the Ministry had reached a level of stability where she was confident enough to turn it over to the able hands of Seamus Finnigan and return to her first love, education.

"The Ministry has also initiated programs designed to live in harmony with the muggle world, but we must go beyond this. We must stop thinking of the world as divided but recognize the fact these lines are blurry at best, that both the muggle world and the magical world and everything in-between are but different aspects of an united whole."

She nodded towards the Minister and his wife. Lavender gave her a short smile. After all those years, after all the animosity, the two women had come to a sort of understanding. It was, after all, Lavender who had saved Hermione's life and Hermione who had created the safe world that Lavender's children were now growing up in.

In the row behind them sat Teddy and Dalia. He was twenty now and she eighteen. The few wizards who had known his father at his age could see the eerie resemblance. His brown hair was long and ragged and his eyes contained all the kindness and understanding of his father. He reached out tentatively and took his girlfriend's hand in his, caressing her palm with his thumb.

Severus turned to glare at Teddy and his first instinct was to drop her hand in fear, but instead he met the man's eye and tightened his grip on his girlfriend. The man had harassed him as his teacher for years, had been extra hard on him because he could tell the boy was interested in his adopted daughter in ways that he did not approve of, but Teddy was an auror now and he could not allow this man to intimidate him any more.

He held the man's dark gaze for several moments until the man finally nodded and turned away. He couldn't help but feel he had just gotten some sort of an acceptance.

Severus sighed. It seemed as though Dahlia was set on dating Teddy Lupin, despite his best efforts. Although he had to admit that despite all the crap he had put the boy through over the years, he really was a good kid. And if anyone had to touch Dahlia, it might as well be Teddy. To console himself, he thought of what Petunia Dursley's reaction would be to her granddaughter dating the son of a werewolf. A small smile crept across his lips.

The speech ended and the crowd dispersed and left, leaving but a few to stroll around the stone circle, reading the names in the stones.

Teddy knelt down by the stones marked _RL_ and _NT_. He came her often, to talk to the stones, sometimes just to sit with them.

He stood to face the young woman who waited for him. They had been friends since that day they had first met. Not only had they both been orphaned as babies, but both of their parents had been murdered. They had remained friends through their education at Hogwarts. It wasn't until his last year in school that they had taken it beyond friendship. He was two years older than her and had started his training to be an auror while she was still finishing up her last year of school. He liked to think that his mother would have been proud of him for following in her footsteps. His parents and many others had given their lives to make a safe world for him to live in and he intended to do his best to keep it that way...to make the most of their sacrifice.

"She graduates this year," Hermione commented to her husband as they watched the two young people from across the field.

"Yes. But it's not like she'll be leaving."

He smiled a small smile. Dahlia had decided to become a professor. It was hardly surprising.

"I was thinking of giving Grimmauld Place to Teddy. After all, he is the heir of the house of Black."

"I'm sure that the portrait of Old Mrs. Black will be thrilled."

She laughed softly.

The last member of the most ancient of the pureblood lines was the son of a werewolf and a half-blood and had a muggleborn girlfriend. Mrs. Black certainly would have a thing of two to say about that. Hermione took it as proof of how quickly things could change, in the span of only a few generations how much was possible. The world moved forwards with surprising speed and fluidity.

Hermione laid a single white rose down next to two stones which lay side-by-side in the soft grass. A lone tear rolled off her cheek and dropped onto the stone surface, creating a dark spot on the smooth gray. She touched the stone lightly, feeling it's hardness against her fingertips, tracing the scratches which made the letters _GW_, then laid it back down along-side the stone which bore the initials _HP_. She liked to think that wherever they were, at last they were together.

Severus took her hand and led her back to the gates of Hogwarts. They had both settled back into the castle, she as headmistress and he retired and free to pursue his private research, something which he found enormously satisfying. Sometimes she even allowed some of the more talented students assist him with his work.

They had both grown up into times of war, had both lived the greater part of their lives with their wands only a split-second away from their fingertips. It had been difficult to adjust to the lack of danger, to living without the constant fear, without the paranoia. Severus felt as though he had been holding his breath since he was sixteen years old. It had taken him seven years of peace, but he finally felt like he could breathe again. He closed his eyes as they walked and let the soft, sweet air fill his lungs.

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_A/N: Thank you to everyone who stuck with this story all the way through and everyone who reviewed. I have a couple of ideas for my next story that I'm going to start posting and kinda see which one takes off._


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